Chapter 10
I read it again.
And again.
The room disappeared around me.
I was nineteen when those transactions occurred.
Nineteen.
I barely remembered going to my father’s offices except to ask for money, borrow cars, or pretend I was interested in the family business.
“What files?” I whispered.
Evelyn shook her head.
“That’s what Clara was trying to discover.”
Chapter 2: The truth my family buried
Back at the hospital, I sat alone in the chapel.
I had not prayed seriously since my mother died.
Even then, I wasn’t sure I had prayed so much as negotiated.
Keep her alive.
I’ll change.
Give us another year.
I’ll become better.
God had apparently understood me well enough not to take the deal.
My mother died anyway.
And I changed almost nothing.
Now I sat beneath stained glass with Daniel Mercer’s letter folded inside my jacket and tried to remember an afternoon from twenty years earlier.
Files.
My uncle.
My father.
I closed my eyes.
At first there was nothing.
Then fragments.
My father’s old office on LaSalle.
Dark wood.
The smell of cigars.
A baseball game playing quietly on a small television in the back room.
Raffaele telling two assistants to move archive boxes downstairs.
My father shouting.
That part returned sharply.
“Those stay here.”
Raffaele laughing.
“Antonio, they’re dead projects.”
“Then they can die upstairs.”
I had been sitting outside.
Nineteen.
Impatient.
Waiting for my father to give me the keys to his Mercedes.
I remembered Raffaele walking out carrying a box himself.
He saw me.
Smiled.
And dropped something into my lap.
A set of keys.
“Do your uncle a favor, kid.”
I opened my eyes.
The chapel was silent.
Keys.
To what?
I stood so quickly the pew creaked.
Mateo was outside.
“I need records from my old apartment.”
“What records?”
“Everything from when I was nineteen.”
“You lived in three places when you were nineteen.”
“The Gold Coast condo.”
He studied me.
“You remembered something.”
“Maybe.”
“What?”
“Raffaele gave me keys.”
“To what?”
“I don’t know.”
I started walking.
“Find the storage inventory from that condo.”
Mateo followed.
“Dom, that was two decades ago.”
“I never throw anything away.”
“That’s not true. You threw away a forty-thousand-dollar dining table because Serena said—”
I stopped.
Mateo closed his mouth.
Neither of us needed the rest of that sentence.
“Just find it.”
Serena was waiting outside Clara’s intensive care room.