Chapter 9
“I have my apartment.”
“You also have a mysterious shell company trying to buy your childhood home.”
“Fair.”
Dante offered to arrange secure transportation. Sarah told him she had a perfectly good SUV and a fiancé who drove like an anxious grandfather.
Daniel, still typing, said, “That is accurate.”
Before leaving, I returned to the basement wall.
My height marks stood beside the open space, fragile pencil lines surviving all the years and now even this intrusion.
I touched Emma, 8.
That was the year Mom died.
The year Dad began carrying twice as much love in one body.
Dante stood a few feet behind me.
“I thought finding answers would make me feel closer to them,” I said. “But right now, I feel like they’re farther away.”
“No,” he said softly. “You are seeing more of the distance they crossed for you.”
My throat tightened.
I looked back at him.
“You say things like that and then expect me not to like you.”
His eyes held mine.
“I don’t expect anything from you.”
Maybe that was why I believed him.
Upstairs, Sarah called my name, and the moment broke.
I slept at Sarah’s house that night in her guest room under a quilt that smelled like clean cotton and lavender. I did not sleep well, exactly, but I slept more deeply than I had in weeks.
In the morning, sunlight spilled across the walls.
For a few quiet seconds, I forgot everything.
Then my phone buzzed.
A message from Dante.
Dante: Daniel found the owner of Green Coat Holdings.
I sat up so quickly the quilt slid to the floor.
Another message appeared.
Dante: You should hear it in person.
I stared at the screen, pulse quickening.
Downstairs, Sarah was making coffee. Daniel was on the phone in his office, using the calm, firm voice of a man ruining someone’s morning with paperwork.
I came into the kitchen barefoot, holding my phone.
Sarah took one look at my face and turned off the coffee grinder.
“What happened?”
“Dante found out who owns Green Coat Holdings.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know yet. He says I should hear it in person.”
Sarah’s expression shifted into protective fury.
“I hate when men say dramatic things before breakfast.”
“So do I.”
But my hands were shaking.
Thirty minutes later, Dante arrived.
He did not come in with an entourage. Just himself, wearing a dark coat and carrying a folder.
Sarah opened the door and pointed at him.
“No suspense for style. Speak.”
Dante looked at me.
The folder in his hand seemed heavier than paper.
“Green Coat Holdings is owned through a trust,” he said.
“What trust?” I asked.
He hesitated.
That hesitation frightened me more than the answer.
“The Clara Bellini Trust.”
My mother’s real name.
The kitchen tilted.
Sarah grabbed my arm.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I whispered. “My mother is dead.”
“Yes,” Dante said carefully.
“Then who controls it?”
He opened the folder and removed a copied document.
At the bottom was a trustee signature.
Not my father’s.
Not Dante’s uncle’s.
Not Marcus Romano’s father’s.
The signature was neat, elegant, and completely unfamiliar.
Lena Moretti.
L.M.
The initials on my mother’s pendant.
My pulse roared in my ears.
Dante placed another page on the table.
“This was attached to the trust filing.”
It was a scanned photograph from an old identification document.
A woman in a green coat stood outside Bellini’s café, her hair pinned back, her expression serious, her eyes fixed on the camera with quiet strength.
But it was not the coat that made my breath stop.
It was her face.
Not because I knew it.
Because on the back of the photograph, in my mother’s handwriting, were four words that changed everything.
May you like
Emma’s first guardian mother.
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