Chapter 2
Chapter 2
“Yes,” she said. “I was there.”
“You admit it.”
“I was there.”
“The study is restricted.”
“I know.”
Mrs. Conte seemed almost disappointed by how easily it came. She held out the letter.
“Then there is nothing more to discuss.”
Alessia did not take it.
“There is.”
“Miss Romano—”
“You said I was fired for entering the study.”
“You were.”
“Then why is my suitcase packed?”
The silence that followed was not the silence Dante brought with him. It was a different kind — the silence of twenty people realizing, all at once, that they had heard something they were not supposed to notice.
Alessia looked toward the door.
“I came downstairs eight minutes ago,” she said. “That suitcase takes at least twenty minutes to pack properly. I know, because I packed Mrs. Conte’s for her when she went to her sister’s in March.”
Several employees exchanged glances. One of the younger maids looked at the floor.
Mrs. Conte’s expression hardened. “What are you suggesting?”
“That you decided what happened before you asked me.”
The room went still.
Dante moved.
Only one step — down onto the marble, one hand in his pocket, the other loose at his side — but it was enough. The air in the foyer changed weight.
Alessia felt his attention settle on her the way a spotlight settles, and she made herself stand straight under it.
Seven months. She had scrubbed his floors and ironed his shirts and learned the exact temperature of the water he drank and never once spoken to him directly. She had learned the house the way a mouse learns a room — where the floor creaks, where the cameras point, which doors are locked and which are only pretending to be.
And she had learned that the staff understood something about Dante Moretti that the outside world did not. The city knew him by another name. Mafia boss. They said it in whispers on the news and in restaurants and in the back of cars. In this house, no one said it at all. They did not have to. It was in the way the delivery men handed over their clipboards. It was in the way Mrs. Conte lowered her voice when she said his name.
Mrs. Conte extended the letter again.
“Take it.”
May you like
Alessia looked down at the paper. Then she reached into the pocket of her uniform and took out the silver housekeeping key — the small one, the one that opened the staff corridors and the linen room and, according to the engraving on its face, nothing else.
