Chapter 9 - THE HOUSE WITH NO GHOSTS
My heart stopped cold on the freezing pier.
“Luca!” I cried out, holding up my glowing phone screen over the sound of police radios and slamming car doors. “It’s my mom! Leo isn’t in his room!”
Marco’s head snapped up from his brother’s shoulder, every ounce of color draining from his scarred face at the thought of the son he hadn’t even held yet being in danger.
Before Luca could bark an order to Dante, a fourth unmarked police cruiser pulled past the barricade at the harbor entrance and rolled slowly down Pier D with its warm interior dome light switched on.
The back door opened.
Out hopped eleven-year-old Leo in his oversized winter puffer jacket over his dinosaur pajamas, wearing snow boots with the laces untied, still clutching his red plastic Engine 14 firetruck under one arm. Behind him stepped my mother, wrapped in two wool coats with a portable oxygen tank slung over her shoulder by a very patient female FBI agent.
“Mom!” I ran down the dock and threw my arms around her both, half-laughing and half-sobbing. “Your text scared the life out of me!”
“Well, I tried to keep him in the back bedroom like Mr. Moretti said,” Mom huffed, though her eyes were shining with tears as she looked past me toward the boat. “The second the FBI agents knocked on our door to put us in protective custody and mentioned Burnham Harbor, Leo climbed out the ground-floor sunroom window and sat on the hood of the federal car until they agreed to bring us both!”
Leo walked past the flashing blue lights and stopped five feet from the gangplank of The Sea Glass.
First, he looked at Sofia. To him, she had always been “Aunt Elena from Milwaukee” who called him every Sunday night and smelled like peppermint and diner coffee whenever she visited in secret.
Sofia dropped to her knees on the snowy planks, holding out her scarred hands.
“Leo,” she whispered, tears streaming down her face. “Honey, there’s something Grandma Helen and I couldn’t tell you while bad people were looking for us.”
Leo looked from her face to the tall man with the scarred throat standing right behind her. Then the eleven-year-old boy looked down at the red plastic firetruck in his hands.
Kids aren’t nearly as easy to fool as grown-ups think they are.
“You have the same chin as me,” Leo said quietly to Marco.
Marco’s chin trembled. A man who had survived a skull fracture, a house fire, and twelve years of exile dropped to both knees in the slush beside Sofia, unable to speak through the tears choking his throat. He simply nodded.
“Did you really give me this truck?” Leo asked, holding out Engine 14.
“I bought it the day your mom told me you were coming,” Marco rasped, his voice breaking. “And I’ve missed every single day since, buddy. Every single one.”
Leo didn’t hesitate. He stepped forward and buried his face against Marco’s flannel shirt, wrapping both arms around his father’s neck while Sofia threw her arms around both of them, pulling them together into a circle that twelve years of lies hadn’t been able to break.
Fifty feet away, as federal marshals led Vanessa Bellini toward a waiting transport van, she twisted around in her fur coat, her mascara smeared in black tracks down her cheeks. Her diamond bracelet was gone—confiscated as evidence alongside her bloodstained gown cuff.
“Luca!” she screamed over the wind. “Luca, look at me! You can’t let them put me in a cage! I was nineteen!”
Luca didn’t even turn his head. He stood beside me and my mother, watching his brother hold his nephew for the very first time. For Luca Moretti, Vanessa Bellini and her father were already ghosts.
Three months later, the winter snow was still piled high along the wrought-iron gates of the Moretti estate, though the mansion inside felt like an entirely different house.
The east wing, which had stood shuttered behind heavy velvet drapes for twelve years, had been completely rebuilt with floor-to-ceiling windows that let the morning sun pour across new oak floors.
On a Saturday evening in February, the long mahogany dining table was set for dinner once again.
There were no corrupt aldermen, no billionaire developers, and no fake socialites in red silk gowns.
At the head of the table sat Marco, with Sofia right beside him—wearing her mother-in-law’s silver locket, freshly polished and hung on a brand-new chain around her neck. Across from them sat my mother, whose oncology bills had been paid in full by the Moretti family foundation, and who now had a sunny ground-floor suite of her own right next to the conservatory so she never had to climb stairs again.
Beside her, Leo was happily explaining the rules of street hockey to Dante, who had been promoted and given a bonus equal to the bribe he’d turned over to the feds. Every few minutes, Leo would look over at Marco and grin, just to make sure his dad was still sitting there.
I pushed through the swinging kitchen door carrying a warm porcelain tureen of homemade tortellini soup—not in a maid’s uniform, because I hadn’t worn an apron in three months. Since January, I had been enrolled full-time at Loyola University’s nursing program on a scholarship Luca had secretly funded before I even knew about it, while helping Sofia manage the family’s new charity clinic on the West Side.
Before I could set the tureen down, Luca stood up from his chair, walked over to me, and took the heavy dish right out of my hands.
He was wearing a soft charcoal sweater with the sleeves pushed up over his tattooed forearms, looking ten years younger than he had on the night of the engagement dinner.
“What did I tell you about serving at this table, Emily?” Luca asked quietly, a warm glint in his dark eyes as he set the soup down himself.
“Force of habit, Mr. Moretti,” I smiled, my cheeks warming.
“And what did I tell you about calling me Mr. Moretti?”
He pulled out the chair right beside his at the table—the exact same chair he had told me to sit in on the night my uniform sleeve was torn and red wine was dripping down my front.
Only tonight, when I sat down, nobody laughed, and nobody looked away.
Underneath the table, Luca reached over and gently closed his warm hand around mine, his thumb brushing across my knuckles.
May you like
“Welcome home, Emily,” he said softly.
Across the table, Leo raised his glass of apple cider high into the chandelier light, and for the first time in twelve years, the Moretti mansion was filled with the sound of a real family laughing together.
