Chapter 7 - THE ST. JUDE FILE
The floorboards beneath my shoes felt as though they had dropped away.
Every pair of eyes in the mahogany study turned toward the conservatory doorway where I stood in my gray maid’s uniform.
“What did you say about my mother?” I whispered.
My mother, Clara Collins, was fifty-eight years old, a retired seamstress who had raised me alone on the South Side after my father died before I was born.
Our landlord was a property management company on Western Avenue—or so I had believed my entire life.
“Don’t look so shocked, sweetheart,” Michael said bitterly, leaning one hip against the edge of Luca’s desk as if throwing a grenade into the room was the only thing keeping Luca from shooting him on the spot. “When Vanessa hired a private investigator three months ago to figure out why a nobody maid was spending so much extra time in my mother’s bedroom, I read the background report myself. The three-flat building where you and Clara Collins live? Owned by an LLC registered to Adrian Costa since nineteen ninety-five.”
I slowly turned my head toward Adrian Costa.
The sixty-five-year-old man standing by the fireplace looked back at me with eyes so full of sorrow and terrified recognition that my heart slammed against my ribs.
“You came to the gate three months ago,” I breathed, remembering the afternoon Luca’s guards had shoved him back onto the sidewalk while I watched from the foyer window. “You looked right at me through the glass. I thought you were looking for Sophie.”
“I came to see both of you,” Adrian said, his voice trembling as he took a half-step toward me before stopping himself. “When I found out from my old neighbor that Clara’s daughter had taken a housekeeping job inside Luca Moretti’s mansion to pay for Clara’s hip surgery, I nearly lost my mind trying to get past those gates to warn you to quit.”
“Warn her about what, Adrian?” Luca stepped between us, his tall frame tense with a protective fury he could barely contain. “How do you know Hannah’s mother?”
Luca picked up the blue envelope Michael had thrown onto the desk and pulled out the single sheet of faded carbon-copy paper inside.
It wasn’t a birth certificate.
It was an employment and non-disclosure release from St. Jude’s Women’s Clinic, dated April 1992—three years before I was born—signed by a twenty-four-year-old nurse’s aide named Clara Collins, and co-signed by Teresa Moretti.
“Look at the date, Luca,” Michael laughed harshly, though sweat was running down his temples. “Elena found the copy of that clinic receipt in Mom’s third-floor cedar chest four years ago when she was looking for holiday linens! That’s why Elena bought those tickets to Montreal! Not because of the mob, and not because of me—because she found out what this family covered up at St. Jude’s clinic, and she was coming to Clara Collins’s apartment to find the truth!”
“Shut your mouth, Michael!” Teresa cried from her wheelchair, trying to push herself forward with one good arm while her face turned a terrifying shade of ash-gray.
“What happened at St. Jude’s in nineteen ninety-two?” Luca demanded, looking down at the faded paper in his hand. “Nineteen ninety-two—I was eight years old. Mom, you were in the clinic that spring. Father told me you lost a baby girl at seven months.”
Teresa covered her face with her trembling left hand, sobbing openly now.
Adrian spoke from beside the fireplace, his voice quiet and steady in the wrecked room.
“She didn’t lose the baby at seven months, Luca,” Adrian said softly. “Your father, Lorenzo, was in the middle of the nineties turf war. Someone had already planted a car bomb outside his social club in Little Italy. When the baby girl was born six weeks early at St. Jude’s, Lorenzo was terrified his enemies would use a sick newborn in a hospital incubator to bring him to his knees—or worse, that a daughter in the Moretti house would one day be traded off in a marriage deal the way Vito Bellini tried to trade Vanessa tonight.”
My knees went weak, and I had to grip the doorframe of the conservatory to stay upright.
“No,” I whispered, shaking my head. “No, I’m twenty-five. I was born in ninety-five. My mother has my birth certificate in her dresser drawer.”
“You were born in ninety-two, Hannah,” Adrian said gently, tears shining in his tired gray eyes. “Wait until you hear the whole truth before you judge Clara. Her husband—who worked at my hardware store and was my best friend—died of a heart attack the same week her own newborn baby was stillborn at St. Jude’s. Teresa and Clara shared a wall in the maternity ward. When Lorenzo Moretti decided the safest way to keep his premature daughter alive was to declare her dead and raise her completely outside the Mafia, Clara agreed to take you home under her stillborn daughter’s name. Three years later, when it was time to register you for preschool and you were still tiny from being premature, Clara forged the year on the parish baptismal record to ninety-five so nobody in the neighborhood would connect you to the spring Teresa Moretti lost her child.”
The room spun around me.
I looked down at the silver rosary still wrapped around my fingers—the rosary Teresa had pressed into my hand instead of Luca’s.
All those mornings over the last eleven months when Teresa had held my face in her trembling hands while I braided her gray hair.
All those weeks she had fought through the damage in her brain to practice saying two names over and over again when nobody else was around:
Sophie.
And Hannah.
I hadn’t been the maid she trusted because I was kind to her.
I was her daughter.
I was Luca Moretti’s sister.
“When Elena found the St. Jude paper in the cedar chest four years ago,” Adrian continued, looking at Luca, “she called me because my hardware store was listed as the guarantor on Clara’s apartment lease. I told Elena everything. And Elena realized that Michael had also been snooping around the family trust documents because he was furious that Teresa’s will left half her personal estate to an unnamed trust on Western Avenue. Elena was terrified Michael would hurt Clara and Hannah to keep the whole inheritance for himself—so she bought tickets to Montreal to get Sophie out of the house before telling you what your brother was doing!”
May you like
Before Luca could take a breath to answer, the conservatory door behind me rattled, and the sharp sound of shattering glass echoed from the outer terrace.
When I spun around, the wicker bench behind the parlor palms was empty, the terrace doors stood wide open to the sleet, and Vanessa Bellini was running across the dark lawn holding Sophie by the wrist.
