Chapter 3 - The Price of a Name
The morning light did not warm the villa; it only exposed the dust that settled over everything like an ash fall.
I did not sleep. I spent the remaining hours of the night in the study, turning the cassette over in my fingers, feeling the rough plastic edges, the scratched surface where a sticker had once lived before Chiara scraped it off with a fingernail.
By seven, Giulia was at the door with a tray of fresh espresso and bread. She did not look at me. Her hands were steady, but her shoulders were pulled tight against her neck, the posture of a woman who knew she was standing on thin ice over deep water.
Leave it, I said.
She set the tray down on the edge of the desk. Her fingers brushed the wood for a fraction of a second longer than necessary.
Mr. Moretti, she said quietly, her voice barely louder than the steam rising from the cup.
Speak.
Mia is only four. She doesn't understand this house. If there's... if the child brought trouble—
No one is touching the child, I said. Go back to the kitchen.
She bowed her head, a small, stiff movement, and turned to go. At the door, she hesitated. The lady—your wife—she used to give Mia’s mother bread when we first came here from Calabria. She wasn't like the others. She didn't look down.
I stared at the black coffee. She wasn't like the others.
No, Chiara was not like the others. The Moretti women were carved from the same grey granite as the villa—unyielding, silent, fiercely loyal to the family name above all else. Valentina was the purest distillation of that bloodline. But Chiara had come from a small coastal town near Bari where people still sang in the streets and didn't lock their doors until the fishing boats came home. I had brought her into this stone fortress because I thought her softness would be a shield against my world.
Instead, my world had crushed her. Or Valentina had.
At nine o'clock, Matteo arrived from the city. He didn't use the front entrance; he came through the underground garage, stepping out of an armored Mercedes with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.
He found me in the study, standing by the window watching the gardeners prune the dead branches off the lemon trees.
Boss, Matteo said, setting the briefcase on the desk and snapping the locks open. We ran the serial number on the cassette case. It’s a standard Sony microcassette, manufactured in Milan in 2014. The same year—
The year Chiara died, I finished for him.
Yes. And we checked the staff logs from that week. The night before her car went off the cliff, your sister signed out the master keys for the east wing archive. She claimed she was inventorying old family ledgers.
And the tape recorder?
Matteo hesitated, his hand hovering over the open briefcase. We found an old Grundig dictaphone in the storage room behind the chapel. It’s missing its power cord, but it takes batteries. Four AAs.
I turned from the window. Bring it here.
It wasn't in the briefcase. Matteo reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small, grey plastic box, scratched and yellowed with age, smelling faintly of the damp earth in the cellar. He set it down beside Chiara’s cassette.
I didn't plug it in immediately. I looked at the two objects—the machine that could speak and the tape that held the voice—like a man staring at a loaded pistol on a table.
May you like
If I play this, Matteo, I said, looking out at the gardens where the gardeners were bagging dead leaves, there is no going back to the way things were yesterday.
You haven't been living in yesterday for eight years, Boss, Matteo said quietly. You’ve been living in a tomb.
