Chapter 4: What Vanessa Already Knew
I didn't sleep.
I sat at the kitchen table in Cicero with the white card in front of me and my mother's dialysis schedule pinned to the wall behind it, and I tried to make the two things exist in the same world.
At 4 a.m.
I heard Mom's door open.
She shuffled out in her robe, saw me, and stopped.
"You're still in your jacket."
"Couldn't sleep."
She sat down across from me without asking permission.
That was always how she operated.
She looked at the card but didn't touch it.
"Whose is that?"
"Dominic Moretti's."
The silence that followed was a half-second too long.
"Mom."
"I heard you."
"You knew that name before I said it."
She looked at her hands on the table.
"Avery—"
"Did you know him?
Did Dad know him?"
"It was a long time ago."
"That's not an answer." I leaned forward.
"He told me Dad's death wasn't an accident.
He said he's known for six years.
So I need you to tell me right now what you know, because I am done being the only person in this family who doesn't have the full story."
Her eyes filled.
She didn't let them spill.
"Your father worked for Moretti," she said.
"Not Dominic.
His father.
Enzo Moretti.
Before Dominic took over the business."
"Worked for him how?"
"Logistics.
Moving things.
He told me it was just freight coordination.
I believed him because I wanted to." She paused.
"Then he started coming home scared.
Not nervous.
Scared.
He said he'd seen something he wasn't supposed to see.
He said he was going to report it."
"Report it to who?"
"I don't know.
He wouldn't tell me.
He said the less I knew, the safer we'd be." Her voice broke on the last word.
She pressed her lips together until it steadied.
"Three weeks later, the warehouse fire."
I sat back in my chair.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"You were nineteen.
You'd just lost your father.
What was I supposed to say — your father was tangled up with the Moretti family and now he's de@d and we don't know who to trust?
You would have gone looking for answers.
You would have gotten yourself kjlled."
"Mom—"
"You were nineteen," she said again.
Harder this time.
Final.
I looked at the card.
Then back at her.
"Vanessa knew your name," I said.
"She knew about your dialysis.
She knew exactly what to say to break me tonight.
That's not a coincidence.
Someone told her."
Mom's face changed.
The grief in it shifted into something colder.
"Then someone is still watching us," she said quietly.
I picked up the card.
"I'm calling him in the morning."
"Avery.
Be careful.
Dominic is not his father.
But he grew up in that world.
He knows how it works.
That means he knows how to use people who want the truth badly enough."
"I know." I looked at her.
"But I've been scraping other people's floors for eight years, Mom.
I'm done."
She reached across the table and put her hand over mine.
She didn't say anything.
She didn't need to.
I called the number at nine the next morning from the parking lot of her dialysis center, where I could see her through the window, seated and hooked in, reading a magazine like the world was ordinary.
It rang twice.
"I wondered if you'd call," Dominic said.
"I almost didn't.
Tell me about my father."
"Not on the phone.
There's a coffee shop on Wabash, two blocks south of the river.
Noon."
"I'll be there at eleven-fifty."
A pause.
"Why eleven-fifty?"
"Because I don't walk into rooms after the person who chose them."
Another pause.
Longer.
"Eleven-fifty," he said.
He was already there when I arrived.
Sitting with his back to the wall, facing the door, a cup of coffee in front of him that he hadn't touched.
He watched me cross the room without moving.
I sat down.
"Start talking."
He reached into his jacket and placed a photograph on the table between us.
A man I recognized.
Older.
Heavier.
But the eyes were the same eyes I'd seen in the mirror my whole life.
My father.
Standing next to a man I didn't recognize.
Both of them in front of a warehouse I didn't recognize.
Both of them smiling.
"Who is that with him?" I asked.
Dominic's finger moved to the second man in the photograph.
"That," he said, "is my father.
Taken fourteen months before the fire."
I looked up.
"And the warehouse?"
"The one that burned."
I set the photograph down carefully, like it might break.
"Your father knew what my father was planning to do," Dominic said.
"He was going to testify.
My father found out.
The fire was arranged." He stopped.
"I found the records six years ago, buried in the company's old operational files when I took over.
I've been trying to find a way to use them without destroying everything my father built — and everyone who depends on it — ever since."
"That's a very convenient moral dilemma."
"Yes," he said.
"It is."
"And Vanessa?"
His jaw tightened.
"What about her?"
"She knew my name before I arrived.
She knew about my mother.
You said last night that she chose what she said to me.
So I'm asking you directly — did you tell her about my family?"
He looked at me steadily.
"No."
"Then how did she know?"
He picked up his coffee.
Put it down without drinking.
"That," he said slowly, "is what I've been trying to figure out since last night."
Outside, a truck rumbled past on Wabash.
Inside, the coffee shop noise continued around us — cups, conversation, the ordinary world doing ordinary things.
"Someone else knew about your father," I said.
"Someone who told Vanessa.
Someone who wanted me broken before I could ask the right questions."
Dominic didn't answer.
But he didn't deny it either.
May you like
And the way he was looking at me — not at the photograph, not at the table, but at me — told me he already had a name in mind.
He just wasn't ready to say it yet.
