Chapter 1
Regret.
And somehow that frightened me most.
“Grace,” he said quietly, “there are things we need to discuss.”
I stared at him.
“Five minutes ago, you wanted me to attend your brother’s wedding because I supposedly don’t want anything from you. Now another family is interested because I’m attending.”
I folded my arms.
“So which part did you leave out?”
Ethan looked toward the door.
“I’ll give you two privacy.”
“No,” Alessandro said.
Ethan stopped.
Alessandro’s jaw tightened.
“She deserves a witness.”
That was not the answer I expected.
I felt some of my anger shift into confusion.
“A witness to what?”
Alessandro walked toward the long marble island and rested both palms against it.
For once, the terrifying Alessandro Moretti looked like a man trying very carefully to choose words that could not be taken back.
“Three days ago, an attorney named Samuel Greene contacted me.”
I frowned. “I don’t know anyone named Samuel Greene.”
“He represented my mother’s estate.”
That caught me off guard.
I knew Alessandro’s mother, Sofia Moretti, had died nearly six years earlier. The household still kept photographs of her in several rooms. She had been beautiful in a quiet, elegant way, always smiling as though the person behind the camera mattered more than the camera itself.
“What does his call have to do with me?”
“Apparently, my mother left instructions concerning a sealed letter.”
“A letter?”
“For you.”
I stared at him.
“That’s impossible.”
“I thought so too.”
“I never met your mother.”
Alessandro’s eyes stayed on mine.
“That may not be entirely true.”
A strange pressure formed behind my ribs.
“What are you talking about?”
He straightened.
“When you applied here eleven months ago, your résumé listed your mother as Marianne Miller.”
My throat tightened at the sound of her name.
My mother had been gone four years.
She had raised me mostly alone after my father died when I was seventeen. She taught music at a public elementary school, volunteered at the library, grew tomatoes badly, and believed nearly every emotional problem could be improved by feeding someone soup.
Nothing about her life had ever belonged anywhere near families like the Morettis.
“Yes.”
“Was Marianne her birth name?”
I opened my mouth.
Then stopped.
A memory surfaced.
My mother standing beside the hall closet during my last year of college, holding an old wooden box.
Don’t worry about these things, sweetheart.
What things?
Old family complications.
At the time, I had assumed she meant my father’s relatives.
I looked at Alessandro.
“I don’t know.”
Ethan shifted almost imperceptibly.
Alessandro asked, “Did you ever hear the name Mariana Bellini?”
The kitchen seemed to move beneath my feet.
Not because I recognized it clearly.
Because I almost did.
A sound.
A fragment.
A name overheard through a bedroom wall many years ago.
My mother crying on the telephone.
Please, Teresa. I can’t go back to being Mariana.
I had been twelve.
I had forgotten it until that exact moment.
I grabbed the edge of the counter.
“Oh my God.”
Alessandro moved instinctively toward me but stopped before touching me.
I appreciated that more than I could explain.
“You recognize it.”
“I remember my mother saying it once.”
My voice sounded distant.
“Who was she talking to?”
“I don’t know.”
But then another memory came.
Christmas cards that arrived without return addresses.
A woman named Teresa sending flowers after my father’s funeral.
A silver bracelet my mother kept in a drawer but never wore.
Inside it were three tiny engraved letters.
M.B.
I had always assumed they meant Marianne Bennett, the surname I thought she had before marrying my father.
“What does Bellini mean?” I asked.
Ethan glanced at Alessandro.
Alessandro answered.
“Mariana Bellini was Marco Bellini’s younger sister.”
My heart seemed to pause.
“Marco Bellini.”
“Yes.”
I knew that name.
Everyone in Chicago knew that name.
The Bellinis owned hotels, restaurants, commercial properties, and several luxury residential developments. Their family appeared in business magazines and charity photographs.
And according to rumors I had overheard from the mansion staff, the Morettis and Bellinis had disliked each other for more than twenty years.
I stared at Alessandro.
“You’re telling me my mother belonged to that family?”
“Yes.”
“And you knew this?”
“Not when I hired you.”
“But you knew when you walked into this kitchen tonight.”
There it was.
The question that mattered.
Alessandro did not avoid it.
“Yes.”
I laughed once, but there was no humor in it.
“That’s unbelievable.”
“Grace—”
“You knew.”
“Three days.”
“For three days, you knew something about my mother that I didn’t.”
“Yes.”
“And instead of telling me, you invited me to a wedding?”
His expression hardened, though not at me.
“At the time, I didn’t know whether the information was true.”
“You knew enough to investigate.”
“Yes.”
“And enough for Ethan to know.”
Ethan spoke carefully.
“I verified the records.”
I looked at him.
He appeared uncomfortable, which I had not previously believed possible.
“We found your mother’s birth certificate,” he continued. “Mariana Rose Bellini. She legally changed her name to Marianne Bennett at twenty-four, then became Marianne Miller after marrying your father.”
I sat down.
Not gracefully.
I simply found the nearest chair and lowered myself into it.
For several seconds, nobody spoke.
All I could think about was my mother in our tiny kitchen spreading strawberry jam across toast.
My mother singing terribly while cleaning.
My mother complaining about expensive handbags.
My mother driving a twelve-year-old Toyota with a dent in the passenger door because she said replacing a perfectly functional car was ridiculous.
Mariana Bellini.
It felt like someone had taken the photograph of my childhood and changed the caption underneath it.
“Why did she leave?” I whispered.
Alessandro shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
“Does Marco Bellini know about me?”
A pause.
“Yes.”
That hurt more than I expected.
“How long?”
“We don’t know.”
I looked at Ethan.
He answered this time.
“But probably a long time.”
I turned away.
There were suddenly too many pieces.
Too many missing years.
“Then why has no one ever contacted me?”
Alessandro pulled out the chair across from mine.
He sat rather than looming over me.
“I think someone did.”
He reached inside his jacket and placed an envelope on the table.
My name was written across the front.
Grace Miller.
The handwriting was unfamiliar.
The envelope remained sealed.
I looked from it to Alessandro.
“What is that?”
“The letter my mother left.”
I stared at it.
“You already have it?”
“Greene delivered it tonight.”
“Did you read it?”
“No.”
“Could you?”
“Legally? Probably.”
His eyes met mine.
“But it wasn’t written to me.”
Something in my chest loosened by one degree.
I picked up the envelope.
It was heavier than expected.
Inside, I could feel several sheets of paper and perhaps a photograph.
“Why would your mother write to me?”
“I don’t know.”
“And what does any of this have to do with tomorrow?”
Alessandro leaned back.
“My mother and yours knew each other.”
“How well?”
“Very well, apparently.”
Ethan answered.
“We found photographs.”
I looked toward him.
“Photographs where?”
“The Moretti storage archive.”
Of course the Morettis had an archive.
Apparently ordinary families had cardboard boxes in basements and wealthy families had professionally cataloged history.
Ethan unlocked his phone, opened an image, and slid it toward me.
I stopped breathing for a second.
My mother stood beneath a flowering tree, probably twenty-two or twenty-three years old.
Beside her stood Sofia Moretti.
They were laughing.
Not posing.
Laughing.
Sofia had one arm around my mother’s shoulders.
On the back of the original photograph someone had written:
Mariana and Sofia, Lake Geneva, 1994. Still arguing about who cheated at cards.
Tears burned my eyes unexpectedly.
I blinked them away.
“My mother never talked about her.”
“Neither did mine,” Alessandro said.
I looked at him.
For the first time that night, the difference between us seemed to disappear.
He looked confused too.
Not powerful.
Not dangerous.
Simply a son discovering that his mother had kept an entire friendship hidden from him.
“Why?” I asked.
“That’s what I want to know.”
May you like
I stared at the sealed letter.
“And the Bellinis?”
