Chapter 7 - The Letter That Arrived Seventeen Years Too Late
The first envelope arrived on a Tuesday, between an invitation to a school fundraiser and a grocery-store coupon.
I almost threw it away.
Then I saw my mother's handwriting.
Not her actual handwriting, I realized a second later. A photocopy of it, printed beneath my name: MEGAN BENNETT MORETTI.
For a moment, the kitchen disappeared. I was seventeen again, standing outside a hospital room and hoping the doctor had made a mistake.
Roman noticed the way I stopped breathing.
“What is it?”
I turned the envelope over. No return address. Inside was a single page, copied from an old ledger, and a photograph of my mother standing beside Anthony Moretti in front of the Laura building. On the back someone had written: ASK WHO PAID FOR THE FIRE.
“What fire?” Roman asked.
“I don't know.”
Leo came downstairs, seventeen years old and already taller than me, carrying his backpack and a half-eaten piece of toast. He looked at the photograph, then at my face.
“Mom?”
“I'm okay.”
He gave me the expression every teenager reserves for an adult who has just told an obvious lie.
Roman took the paper without touching the photograph. “Let me call Sarah Kim.”
Detective Kim had retired from the Chicago Police Department three years earlier, but she still knew the right people. More importantly, she knew our history. She arrived that afternoon with a younger investigator, Detective Elena Price, who worked financial crimes.
Price examined the copy. “There was a fire at a warehouse on South Halsted twenty-eight years ago. Three businesses lost their inventory. One employee was badly injured.”
“Why would that have anything to do with my mother?” I asked.
“That's what we need to establish,” Price said.
Roman stared at the address printed on the ledger. “My grandfather owned that warehouse.”
The silence afterward felt familiar. Once again, the Moretti family had left us a question instead of an answer.
I expected Roman to tell me not to worry. He didn't.
“I'll give you every record I can find,” he told Price.
That evening, I went to Evelyn's Table. Rosa Delgado was supervising dinner service while three trainees learned how to handle a sudden rush without panicking. The restaurant had grown beyond anything I'd imagined. We had a second training kitchen, a childcare partnership, and graduates running restaurants of their own.
Yet I stood beside the pastry station holding a photograph like a frightened girl.
Rosa took one look at me and handed me a mug of tea.
“Whatever it is,” she said, “you don't have to solve it during dinner.”
“I wish somebody had told my mother that.”
“Maybe somebody did.”
I went home before closing. Roman was waiting at the dining table with an archive box and a face I recognized from the first months after the alley.
“I found something,” he said.
It was a letter from Anthony Moretti to a former insurance adjuster, dated six months after the warehouse fire. The letter mentioned a disputed claim and requested that the adjuster “avoid unnecessary attention to the tenant accounts.”
“That's not a confession,” Roman said.
“No,” I agreed. “But it isn't nothing.”
He nodded. “I've already sent a copy to Price.”
I loved him most fiercely at moments like that. Not when he bought flowers or remembered anniversaries. When he chose the truth even if it might damage the name he carried.
At nine, Leo knocked on our bedroom door.
“Can we talk?”
I put the letter down. “Always.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, suddenly looking younger than seventeen.
“Is someone threatening us?”
“We don't know who sent the envelope,” Roman said. “The police are checking.”
“That's not what I asked.”
I recognized my own stubbornness in him. “We haven't received a direct threat. But we're being careful.”
Leo stared at his hands. “I remember when I was little and everybody kept saying things were fine. Then Mom would cry in the bathroom.”
My chest tightened.
“I thought you didn't notice.”
“I noticed everything.”
Roman sat beside him. “Then you deserve a better answer now. We're worried. We have questions. But we're handling them openly, and you can ask us anything.”
Leo nodded. After a moment he said, “Can I still go to the college visit on Friday?”
“Yes,” I said.
Roman added, “And I'll drive if you want.”
Leo smiled faintly. “Only if you promise not to interview the admissions director like you're buying the university.”
“No promises.”
For the first time that day, we laughed.
At eleven forty-six, Detective Price called.
“We traced the photograph,” she said. “It came from a file kept by the injured warehouse employee. His name was Samuel Ortiz.”
“Can we speak to him?”
“Unfortunately, he died last month.”
My stomach dropped.
“His daughter contacted us after finding his records. She says he spent years trying to prove the fire wasn't an accident.”
I looked at Roman. He understood before I said a word.
“And there's something else,” Price continued. “The insurance file contains a witness statement. Your mother signed it.”
“What did she say?”
Price hesitated.
“She said someone had ordered the fire doors chained shut.”
May you like
Outside our bedroom window, Chicago glittered as if nothing had changed.
But somewhere in the past, a door had been locked. And someone had decided that the people behind it were expendable.
