Chapter 7: The Last Thing Vanessa Said
Nobody moved for a moment.
Then Luca straightened.
He looked at Emily.
She gave a small nod.
They came upstairs together.
I followed.
Vanessa was still seated in the front room.
She hadn't moved from the chair.
Her evening bag was on her lap and her hands were folded over it like she was trying to keep herself anchored.
She looked up when Luca came in.
"This is the last thing," she said.
"After this, I have nothing else."
Luca stood across from her.
He didn't sit.
"Say it."
Vanessa took a breath.
"The man who originally came to me.
The one who claimed to have copies of Rosa's arrangement with Carbone." She paused.
"His name was Peter Aldric.
He used to work bookkeeping for Carbone's property group." Another pause.
"He didn't only come to me."
Luca waited.
"He went to Carbone first.
He told Carbone he had documentation of the original arrangement with Rosa.
He said if Carbone didn't pay him, he'd take it to you." Vanessa's jaw tightened.
"Carbone paid him.
And then had someone make sure he stopped being a problem."
The room went very still.
"He's d*ad?" Luca asked.
"Three months ago.
Ruled an accident." Vanessa looked at her hands.
"That's when Carbone came to me directly.
He told me he knew I'd been managing your accounts.
He said if I didn't get him those documents before your engagement was public, he'd expose the payments I'd made to Aldric." She looked up.
"He had records of the transfers.
Enough to make it look like I'd been working with him from the start."
Emily said, "So you were being blackmailed too."
Vanessa looked at her.
"Yes."
"And you didn't tell my father."
"I thought I could handle it before it went further."
"By clearing out my mother's house."
Vanessa didn't answer that one.
Emily sat down in the chair across from her.
She leaned forward slightly.
"I want to understand something," Emily said.
"When you stood at that service entrance tonight and told me my father didn't want to see me.
When you said his grandchild was a complication.
When you told me my mother spent years cleaning up my father's problems —" She stopped.
"Was any of that about protecting my father?
Or was all of it about buying yourself more time?"
Vanessa looked at her for a long moment.
"Both," she said.
"I'm not going to tell you otherwise."
Emily sat back.
Luca's lawyer appeared in the doorway.
A careful man named Gerald, sixty, with the permanent expression of someone who had spent decades in rooms like this one.
"Luca." Gerald glanced at Vanessa, then away.
"I've reviewed the documents from the cabinet.
We need to talk."
"Now?" Luca asked.
"There's a name in Rosa's records you need to see tonight." Gerald's voice was even.
Deliberate.
"Because he's currently sitting on the city's property licensing board." A pause.
"And he's been there for eleven years."
Luca looked at Vanessa.
"Did you know that?"
She shook her head.
"Carbone never told me who else was involved."
Luca nodded slowly.
He moved toward Gerald.
Then he stopped in the doorway.
He turned back to Vanessa.
"You should have come to me," he said.
"The moment Aldric contacted you.
The moment Carbone made his first threat.
You should have come to me."
Vanessa looked at him.
"I know."
"Instead you chose to protect yourself by dismantling my family."
"I know," she said again.
Her voice was quieter this time.
Luca looked at his engagement ring on her finger.
She saw where he was looking.
She reached up and removed it herself.
She set it on the arm of the chair.
Neither of them spoke.
Luca walked into the next room with Gerald.
Emily and I sat in the front room with Vanessa and the silence of everything that had just ended.
After a long moment, Emily looked at the ring on the chair arm.
"What happens to you now?" she asked.
Not unkindly.
Simply.
"I don't know," Vanessa said.
"Did you cooperate tonight?"
"Yes."
"Fully?"
Vanessa looked at her.
"Everything I know, I've said."
Emily nodded slowly.
"Then I suppose that's something."
Vanessa looked at Emily's stomach.
For the first time all evening, something in her face that wasn't calculation or self-preservation.
"I am sorry," Vanessa said.
"For what I said to you tonight.
About your mother.
About the baby." A pause.
"I was frightened.
That's not an excuse.
I know it isn't."
Emily considered her for a moment.
"No," she said.
"It isn't."
She didn't offer anything more than that.
May you like
But she didn't look away either.
From the other room came the low sound of Luca's voice and Gerald's voice, working through documents, building something solid and legal out of what Rosa had spent thirty years quietly assembling in the dark.
