Chapter 8 - THE ROSARY WITH THE MISSING BEAD
My knees buckled.
This time, my stitched ankle wasn't the reason.
Dominic caught me with both hands, holding me upright against the side of the yacht's cabin as the photograph in the leather ledger blurred through my tears.
"That's her," I whispered, my fingers trembling as I touched the edge of the glossy print. "That's the maple rosary she used to hold whenever there was a thunderstorm in St. Louis. The third bead above the crucifix broke off when I was eight."
On the deck at our feet, Dr. Russo let out a bitter groan as Daniel hauled him to his feet in plastic zip-cuffs before the harbor police reached the pier.
"Ten years ago, Sofia came to Mercy Hospital in St. Louis with congestive heart failure," Russo muttered, blood dripping from his split nose onto his lapel. "I was consulting there for a weekend seminar. When I saw her chart and realized Dominic Valenti's sister was still alive, I told her that if Dominic or Romano ever found out she'd survived the Milwaukee fire, they'd kill her teenaged daughter Emma to settle the old score."
"You monster," I breathed, turning on him so fast Dominic had to keep an arm around my waist. "She made me believe she died in the ICU! I stood beside a closed coffin when I was eighteen because the hospital said there was an infection risk!"
"And she went into the cloistered convent in Evanston under my medical supervision," Russo spat, his eyes darting nervously toward the flashing blue lights turning onto the harbor road. "That was how I got Elena onto the third floor four years ago—Elena found my St. Mary's billing records and realized I was hiding your sister ten miles north of this house! When Elena died on the boat trying to pilot it to Evanston in a storm to reach Sofia herself, I used the prescriptions to blackmail Clara and keep Sofia terrified that Clara and Emma would be killed if she ever stepped outside those convent walls!"
Wait.
"Elena died trying to take the boat to Evanston to tell Sofia she was safe?" Dominic's voice was barely audible, the four-year weight of betrayal and suspicion lifting from his dead wife's memory in a single breath.
"She took the cruiser out herself in four-foot swells because I locked the garage gates," Russo admitted as two of Dominic's clean-up crew stepped onto the dock to hand the doctor and Tommy Romano over to the detectives Dominic kept on his payroll. "It was an accident. I just used it."
Dominic looked down at the harbor water for a long moment, silently saying goodbye to the ghost of the woman who had died trying to reunite his family.
Then he looked at me.
"Evanston is twenty minutes up Sheridan Road," he said quietly.
"What about Leo?" I asked, glancing back toward the SUV where Martha Hale was already sitting wrapped in a dry blanket.
"Daniel is going back to the mansion right now to pick up Leo and Rosa and bring them straight to St. Mary's," Dominic said, taking my hand and guiding me carefully down the gangplank so I wouldn't put weight on my right heel. "Your mother has waited eighteen years to hold her daughter—and five years to meet her grandson. She isn't waiting another hour."
The drive north along the lakefront passed in a breathless blur.
Inside the warm cab of the Escalade, I held theFirst Midwest Bank key and the silver locket with the broken chain tightly in my lap.
All those months I had spent scrubbing marble floors in Dominic Valenti's mansion, walking on tiptoe past his dining room, terrified of losing a minimum-wage shift because I had nobody left in the world to help me raise my little boy.
And the whole time, the man at the head of the table had been my mother's brother—a brother who had kept her childhood picture and her locket locked in cedar and lavender for twenty-two years.
When we pulled up to the wrought-iron gates of St. Mary's Convent just after midnight, the Mother Superior was already waiting under the stone archway with a lantern, having received Dominic's call on the drive up.
"She's in the heated conservatory off the south cloister," the old nun said gently, her eyes crinkling with warmth as she looked at my face. "She hasn't slept since Dr. Russo missed his nine o'clock check-in call. Go right through."
Dominic walked beside me down the quiet flagstone corridor, supporting half my weight so my bandaged foot barely brushed the floor.
Through the glass doors of the conservatory, surrounded by potted ferns and white lilies that smelled like spring in the middle of a cold Chicago night, a small woman in a pale gray shawl was sitting in a wicker armchair.
When the latch clicked, she turned around.
The wooden rosary with the missing third bead slipped from her fingers onto the hem of her skirt.
"Emma?"
Her voice had the same soft, musical catch I had heard in my dreams every single night since I was eighteen years old.
I let go of Dominic's arm, forgot every stitch in my ankle, and ran the last four steps across the tiles, dropping to my knees in front of her chair and burying my face in her warm hands.
"Mama," I sobbed, feeling her thin, familiar fingers stroke my hair just the way she used to when I was small. "You're alive. You're really here."
"My brave girl," she wept, kissing my forehead and my wet cheeks before she looked up past my shoulder at the tall man standing quietly by the glass door. "Dominic? Little brother?"
Dominic walked over and knelt on the stone floor beside me, bowing his dark head as Sofia wrapped both arms around his neck and held us together after twenty-two years of ashes and lies.
Ten minutes later, the conservatory door opened again.
May you like
Daniel stepped inside carrying a wide-awake Leo bundled in his yellow raincoat—and walking right behind him, carrying a small canvas overnight bag, was Marcus Hale, his face pale but steady as he held out the contents of the First Midwest safe-deposit box he had retrieved on the way over.
"Before you judge me for the last twenty-two years, Sofia," Marcus said quietly, setting an old tin recipe box from the bank vault into my mother's lap, "open the bottom envelope. There's something Emma needs to see about the night of the Milwaukee fire."
