Chapter 41
Lorenzo Bellini survived.
He spent four weeks in St. Vincent’s and then four months in a house in Wisconsin that Dante paid for, and then he came back to Chicago and asked to see Dante, and Dante went.
They sat in a diner on Lawrence Avenue for an hour and did not say very much.
“You could have told me,” Dante said, at the end.
“I was afraid,” Bellini said. “I’ve been afraid my whole life. Your mother knew. That’s why she kept me close — not because she trusted me, but because she knew that a frightened man is easy to watch.” He looked at his coffee. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be braver.”
“You stayed,” Dante said. “For twelve years, you stayed.”
“That isn’t the same as being brave.”
“No,” Dante said. “But it’s something.”
They shook hands at the door. Dante never saw him again, though a check went out to his address every month for the rest of his life, and neither of them ever mentioned it.
Room 12 was not sealed again.
Dante had it cleaned — the dust, the shuttered window, the teacup with the dried tea — and he had the desk restored and the lamp rewired, and he put his mother’s photograph back on the desk in the silver frame, and the baby in the picture was still him.
He did not use it as an office. He did not make it a shrine. He simply left the door open, and let the light come in, and let the house have the room back.
The house felt different after that. It took Allesia a while to work out why. It was not that the staff were kinder, or that the corridors were brighter. It was that the silence had changed — the way silence changes in a room where someone has finally said the thing that everyone was not saying. The house was no longer holding its breath.
Allesia moved into the east room on the second floor, with the window that faced the garden.
She did not put the uniform back on. She did not go back to being staff. She did not, for the first two weeks, do much of anything at all — she slept, and she ate, and she walked the grounds, and she sat in the library with a book she did not read, and she let her hands stop shaking.