Chapter 8: The Name That Changed Everything
His name was Dominic Caruso.
Matteo's mother's youngest brother.
The man who had given the toast at Matteo's wedding.
The man whose photograph still sat on the credenza in Matteo's private study, framed between two decades of family occasions.
Matteo didn't move for a long time after Ricci said it.
Sal, standing by the door, looked at the floor.
I watched Matteo's hand on the table.
The knuckles were white.
Then, slowly, they released.
"Get Ricci somewhere safe," Matteo said to Sal.
His voice was completely level.
"Not a location Luca knows.
Use the Wicker Park property."
Sal nodded and moved toward Ricci.
"The recording," Ricci said, still looking at the phone.
"Goes to my attorney in thirty seconds," Matteo said.
"As promised."
He picked up the phone, did something with his thumb, and set it back down.
He waited.
Then he turned it to show Ricci the confirmation screen.
Sent.
Ricci stood, buttoned his jacket, and followed Sal out without another word.
The door closed.
Matteo stood with his back to me for a full minute.
"I'm sorry," I said, because I didn't know what else to offer.
"Don't be." He turned around.
His face was composed but the effort it cost was visible.
"How long have I known?
Somewhere in the back of everything, how long have I known and refused to look at it?" He shook his head once.
"Dominic has been inside every decision I have made for twenty years.
He knew before I acted.
He advised me before I planned.
I thought it was loyalty.
I thought it was family."
"He tried to have you killed twice," I said.
"And he arranged things so that the person who could have exposed him was too frightened to speak."
"My mother's brother." He said it quietly, not to me, just to the fact itself.
"My mother paid for protecting you," I said.
"She spent eleven years raising me alone, working herself into the ground, carrying that secret until the cancer took whatever was left.
And then she died without knowing if it ever mattered." I felt the anger moving through me again, cleaner than it had been at the restaurant, more certain.
"It mattered.
She was right about everything.
And I am not going to let Luca or Dominic Caruso erase what she knew."
Matteo looked at me for a long moment.
"What do you want?" he asked.
Not what he could offer.
What I wanted.
"I want Luca Ferraro to answer for what he did to my mother.
Specifically.
Not quietly.
Not managed away." I held his gaze.
"And I want Dominic Caruso to face what he has done where people can see it."
"That will be difficult."
"I know."
"It will take time."
"I have time."
"And it will require you to stay involved in something you did not ask to be part of."
"My mother was already part of it," I said.
"That makes me part of it.
Whether I asked or not."
Matteo looked at the photograph still lying on the table.
Luca Ferraro, seventeen years younger, standing beside Dominic Caruso in a household kitchen.
Evidence that had waited eleven years inside a blue recipe notebook, beneath a sealed page, behind a lemon pasta recipe that a dying woman had made her daughter memorize by heart.
He picked up the photograph carefully.
"Then we do this correctly," he said.
"And we do it in a way that neither of them sees coming."
He turned toward the window.
Chicago was dark and wide beyond the glass.
"Starting tonight," he said, "Luca Ferraro believes he is still in control.
I want him to continue believing that for exactly as long as it serves us." He paused.
"Can you go back to work at Bellavita tomorrow as though nothing has changed?"
My stomach tightened.
"You want me in the restaurant."
"I want them to believe you found nothing in that notebook, walked away frightened, and decided the warning was enough." He turned back.
"If Luca thinks you've retreated, he will turn his attention back to managing Dominic.
That gives us a window."
"And if he doesn't believe it?"
Matteo's expression didn't change.
"Then we move faster."
I thought about my mother packing grocery bags at midnight.
I thought about her crying through a wall I was too young to understand.
"All right," I said.
"I'll go back tomorrow."
But when I reached the elevator and the doors closed between us, I noticed one thing Matteo hadn't said.
May you like
He had not told me who had taken the original marked fork from the investigation seventeen years ago.
And he had not explained how Dominic Caruso had known, tonight, that I would be the one to cook that dish.
