Chapter 2 - The Price of Leaving
The first thing I asked in Cosimo Ferraro's car was whether Dominic would live.
Matteo answered from the front seat.
“The ambulance team says the wound isn't life-threatening.”
“He drew on you?” I asked.
Matteo met my eyes in the mirror.
“Yes.”
I looked out at Michigan Avenue. People were walking beneath umbrellas, carrying shopping bags, trying to get home.
I wondered what it felt like to have an evening that stayed an evening.
Beside me, Cosimo removed his cuff links.
“You can call someone.”
“Who would you suggest? My father is probably busy deciding whether I embarrassed him more before or after the gunshot.”
“Someone who works for you.”
“I don't have employees.”
“An attorney.”
I looked at him.
“For which part?”
He didn't smile.
“We should find out.”
His apartment occupied the top floors of a building overlooking the river. It was beautiful in the impersonal way of a room nobody had ever argued about paint in.
A woman in a gray cardigan met us inside.
“I'm Ada,” she said. “I've worked here for years. There's a guest room ready, but you don't have to use it. Would you like tea?”
The ordinary question almost made me cry.
“Yes, please.”
Cosimo led me to a dining table. No guards blocked the doorway. My phone remained in my hand.
I noticed those things because I had grown up learning when to notice them.
He placed a folder in front of me.
“Before you open it,” he said, “I need to make something clear. Leaving the hotel with me didn't create an obligation.”
“Including the kiss?”
“Including the kiss.”
I touched the folder but didn't open it.
“Why do you think I'm the person doing my father's accounting?”
“Bellandi sent us five financial summaries last quarter. One contained a reference to an earlier draft. I requested the draft.”
“He shouldn't have sent it.”
“He didn't. A business partner already had a copy. Your name was on the original.”
I remembered the report immediately. A routine review that Bellandi had said wasn't worth discussing upstairs.
“Then I looked at several reports over the past few years,” Cosimo continued. “The same judgments. The same corrections. Your work.”
I opened the folder.
Three summaries. A list of companies. A set of authorizations.
My stomach tightened at the first name.
“This vendor was discontinued nine months ago.”
“It's still receiving payments.”
“Not through the records I review.”
“That's what I need explained.”
I read the first page again, slower.
The figures were familiar. The arrangement wasn't.
Someone had copied ordinary transactions into a second set of records and added payments I had never approved.
My initials appeared at the bottom.
They looked enough like mine to fool someone who wanted to be fooled.
“These aren't my authorizations.”
Cosimo said nothing.
I looked up.
“Do you believe me?”
“I believe we're going to need more than belief.”
It wasn't a comforting answer.
It was better than a false one.
My phone vibrated.
FATHER.
Then SOFIA.
Then FATHER again.
Giulia's message arrived beneath the missed calls.
Are you safe? Please just tell me that.
I answered her first.
I'm safe. Are you?
Three dots appeared. Vanished.
Yes. He took my car keys. I'm in my room.
I stared at the message until Cosimo asked what was wrong.
“My sister.”
“Do you want someone to help her leave?”
“Not yet. If men from your organization appear at the gate, my father will call it an attack.”
He nodded.
“Then we won't do that.”
I hadn't realized how badly I needed to hear a powerful man accept a limit without turning it into an argument.
Ada arrived with tea and a sandwich cut in half.
I ate all of it.
Then I called Miriam Cole.
She had once represented an employee at one of our restaurants in a dispute my father considered an unforgivable waste of everyone's time. I had quietly made sure her client received the money owed.
Miriam answered because it was late enough to suggest trouble.
I explained where I was.
She sighed.
“Francesca, when I said you should eventually call me about leaving home, this is not the exit plan I pictured.”
“It wasn't mine, either.”
“Can you speak freely?”
I looked at Cosimo.
He stood and left the room.
“Yes,” I said.
Miriam listened. Then she asked me careful questions about the work I had done, the papers I had signed, and what I knew about the source of the money.
I could have told her I knew nothing.
I was good at making a messy situation look tidy.
Instead, I told her the truth.
“I knew some of it came from criminal businesses. I thought I could keep the legitimate companies separate. Protect the people who worked for them.”
“And did you?”
“Not as well as I told myself.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“Don't discuss those details with anyone else tonight. Preserve what you already have. Don't alter anything. I'm coming in the morning.”
After the call, I found Cosimo standing by the window.
He had changed out of his jacket. Without it, he looked less like a title and more like a man who hadn't slept properly in some time.
“My attorney will be here at nine.”
“Good.”
“I will review these records with her advice. I won't hand you something so you can hurt whoever appears on the last page.”
His expression closed slightly.
“You think that's what I brought you here for?”
“I don't know you well enough to know what you brought me here for.”
He accepted that without looking pleased about it.
“All right.”
I went back to the table.
Near the bottom of the folder was an authorization dated eighteen months earlier. A payment described as transportation consulting.
My signature appeared underneath it.
I had been in Boston that week, visiting Giulia at a summer program. I remembered because it was the last trip my father allowed us to take together.
On the attached page, a name had been highlighted.
Enzo Ferraro.
I looked toward the window.
Everyone in Chicago knew Enzo had died when a truck struck his car on an expressway ramp. His younger brother had taken control afterward.
“Why is your brother's name in this file?”
Cosimo turned.
For the first time all night, I saw something beneath his restraint that frightened me more than anger.
“Because the company receiving that payment employed the driver who killed him.”
I looked down at my forged signature.
May you like
Someone hadn't just stolen money in my name.
Someone had left me holding the cost of a dead man.
