Chapter 5 - THE HEAVY WOOL COAT
The night air was thick and humid, smelling of impending rain as Carmine led me down the stone pathway behind the main estate.
Hannah and Marco stayed in the house with Mrs. Bennett. This was between a brother and a sister.
I pulled the heavy wool coat tighter around my shoulders. It was an old coat, smelling faintly of pipe tobacco and cedar. It had belonged to our father.
“Where are we going, Carmine?” I asked, my heels clicking softly against the flagstones.
“To the greenhouse,” he replied, not looking back.
Our mother’s greenhouse sat at the edge of the property, a massive glass structure that used to be filled with orchids and hydrangeas. Now, it was dark, illuminated only by the moonlight filtering through the glass panes.
Carmine unlocked the heavy iron door and pushed it open.
The smell of damp earth and blooming jasmine washed over me, instantly transporting me back to my childhood.
Carmine walked to the center of the room, stopping in front of an old, rusted potting bench.
“Vanessa was right about Silvio,” Carmine said quietly, staring at the empty terracotta pots. “I ordered the hit twelve years ago.”
“Why?” I asked. “He was your right hand.”
“Because twelve years ago, I finally found out what he did to you.”
I stepped closer to him. The reversal hit me hard. Carmine hadn’t betrayed me. He had avenged me.
“I thought you left because you hated my life,” Carmine explained, his voice thick with regret. “I thought you couldn’t stomach the business anymore. But twelve years ago, one of Silvio’s men got drunk and talked. He bragged about how they used to follow a little girl home from school to scare her mother out of town.”
Carmine turned to face me. The moonlight caught the tears standing in his eyes.
Answer one: Carmine killed Silvio because he discovered Silvio was the one who drove me and Hannah away.
Open two: If Carmine knew the truth twelve years ago, why didn’t he try to find me then? And what was he waiting to give me?
“When I found out Silvio threatened Hannah... when I realized he was the reason my mother died without her daughter holding her hand...” Carmine’s voice broke. “I didn’t just kill him, Isabella. I erased him.”
“Then why didn’t you call me?” I asked, my voice trembling. “If you knew the truth, why did you let me think you still didn’t want me?”
Carmine looked down at his hands.
“Because I was ashamed,” he whispered. “I was the boss, but my own men were terrorizing my sister behind my back. I failed to protect you. And I knew if I brought you back, the other families might see you as a weakness again. I had to make sure the city was completely secure before I could bring you home.”
He reached under the rusted potting bench.
He pulled out a small, heavy wooden box. It was a cigar humidor that used to sit on our father’s desk.
“I’ve been holding onto this for eighteen years,” Carmine said, placing it on the bench between us. “Mom gave it to me the night before she died. She made me swear not to open it, and to give it directly to you when you finally came home.”
My breath caught in my throat.
I reached out with trembling fingers and undid the small brass latch.
I opened the lid.
Inside wasn't jewelry, or cash, or a letter.
It was a stack of my daughter’s drawings.
Crayon drawings of houses, trees, and stick figures. The exact drawings Hannah used to make when she was a little girl.
I stared at them in profound confusion.
“I don’t understand,” I whispered. “I took all of Hannah’s drawings with us when we moved to Vermont. How did Mom get these?”
I picked up the top drawing.
At the bottom, in Hannah’s messy, ten-year-old handwriting, it read: To Grandma, from Hannah.
But the date in the corner made my blood run cold.
It was dated three weeks after my mother’s funeral.
“Carmine,” I said, my voice barely working. “This date... this was drawn after Mom died.”
Carmine frowned, leaning in to look at the paper. “That’s impossible. Mom handed me that box herself. She said it was your inheritance.”
I quickly flipped through the rest of the drawings. They were all dated months, even years, after my mother passed away.
My heart began to race wildly.
“These aren’t from Hannah,” I realized, a deep, primal panic setting in. “Someone forged these. Someone copied her old drawings and put them in this box.”
I looked at the bottom of the box.
Beneath the stack of fake drawings was a single, folded piece of heavy cardstock.
I pulled it out and opened it.
It was a birth certificate.
The name on it was Marco Orsini. Carmine’s son.
But the name listed under ‘Mother’ wasn’t Carmine’s late first wife.
May you like
It was Vanessa Laurent.
Before I could even process the words on the page, the heavy iron door of the greenhouse slammed shut, locking from the outside with a sharp, metallic clack.
