Chapter 2 - THE LOCK BEHIND THE IVY
The October wind hit us the moment we stepped onto the east terrace.
Behind the tall French doors, thirty wealthy guests stood frozen around the candlelit dining table, watching their host abandon his own engagement party.
Luca didn’t look back at them.
He walked down the stone steps with the brass key clenched in his right hand, his black tuxedo jacket whipping against his frame.
Mr. Petrov walked steadily beside him, his wool cap back on his head.
I followed two steps behind, holding the white-strung bakery box against my chest like it was made of glass.
Then came the sharp, frantic click of high heels on limestone.
“Luca, stop!” Vanessa hissed, catching up to us at the edge of the manicured lawn.
She hadn’t brought a wrap. Her shoulders were bare above the red silk gown, goosebumps rising on her skin, though I didn’t think the chill was from the Chicago air.
“You are turning our engagement into a circus over an old man’s fairy tale,” she said, grabbing his arm.
Luca stopped. He looked down at her hand on his sleeve until she slowly let go.
“You told me three months ago that you checked on the retired staff records,” Luca said quietly. “When I asked why Mr. Petrov’s pension checks were being returned, you showed me a notice from Warsaw.”
My breath caught.
Vanessa’s chin lifted. “That was what the accounting office gave me.”
“You told me he died in Poland two winters ago,” Luca said, his voice dropping an octave. “That was why I stopped looking for him.”
Mr. Petrov blinked in the dim garden light. “I have lived in the same brick two-flat in Lincoln Square for forty-one years, Luca. Right above my niece’s bakery.”
Luca stared at Vanessa. “Why did you tell me he was dead?”
“My father’s firm handles the estate disbursements!” Vanessa snapped, her composure cracking at the edges. “If a clerk filed the wrong notice, how is that my fault? You’re acting like I hid a gardener on purpose!”
“Did you?”
“Why on earth would I care about a gardener?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Luca said.
He turned and kept walking toward the back of the property.
For a moment, I thought Vanessa would go back inside to save face in front of her society friends. Instead, she lifted the hem of her red dress and marched through the damp grass behind us.
She couldn’t afford not to be there when that door opened.
The old greenhouse sat behind a tall yew hedge, cut off from the main grounds. Twenty-six years of creeping Boston ivy had swallowed the iron framework and clouded glass panels.
Luca pulled a thick curtain of vines away from the rusted iron door. Dead leaves showered over his polished shoes.
He slid the brass key into the lock.
It resisted at first. Metal ground against metal.
Then, with a heavy, echoing clunk, the bolt gave way.
The door groaned as Luca pushed it open.
The air inside didn’t smell rotten or abandoned. It smelled of dry cedar, wintergreen, and old potting soil.
Luca reached just inside the frame and flipped an old brass toggle switch. Half the overhead work lights flickered to life, casting a warm amber glow over rows of empty terracotta pots.
In the center of the greenhouse stood a long cedar potting table.
It had been wiped clean.
Sitting in the middle of the wood were three things: a silver pocket watch with a cracked crystal, a cedar cigar box, and a small blue ceramic teacup with a chipped rim.
Luca froze.
“That watch belonged to my father,” he whispered. “He was wearing it the night his car went off the bridge.”
He stepped toward the table and picked it up. The hands were stopped at 11:14.
“The police said the river took it,” Luca said, turning to Mr. Petrov.
“Your father never reached the bridge that night, Luca,” Mr. Petrov said softly. “And neither did your mother.”
Vanessa took a step toward the cedar box, her eyes darting toward the latch. “Luca, you shouldn’t go through this tonight. Let’s take these inside and—”
“Don’t touch that table, Vanessa,” Luca said without looking at her.
He set the watch down and lifted the lid of the cedar box.
Inside lay a stack of soil-ledger notebooks, a gold bracelet set with green peridots, and an 8-by-10 black-and-white photograph.
Luca picked up the gold bracelet first.
Next to me, Vanessa let out a tiny, choked sound.
Her right hand moved instinctively to her own wrist—covering the diamond bracelet she had been adjusting all night in the foyer.
I looked closer at the peridot bracelet in Luca’s hand. The gold links were shaped like tiny interwoven olive leaves.
They were the exact same custom links as the diamond bracelet on Vanessa’s wrist.
Only the stones had been changed.
Luca didn’t notice her hand. He was staring at the photograph beneath it.
From where I stood, holding the cake box, I could see the picture clearly.
It had been taken right here in this greenhouse.
Three young women in late-1990s coats stood smiling behind the cedar potting table.
One was Clara Moretti, Luca’s mother.
The second was a dark-haired woman in a fur collar—Vanessa’s mother, Evelyn Bellini.
And standing between them, wearing an apron with a nursery logo and holding the chipped blue teacup, was a young woman with warm eyes and a crooked smile.
The bakery box nearly slipped from my fingers.
Because I knew that third woman.
Her framed photo sat beside my father’s hospital bed every single day.
It was my mother, Sarah Reed.
Luca turned the photograph over. On the back, written in faded blue ink in his mother’s neat cursive, was a single line:
October 19, 2000 — If anything happens to me this week, Evelyn knows who paid for the brakes, and Sarah has the second key.
May you like
Luca looked up slowly, his dark eyes locking onto mine.
“Emma,” he said, his voice tight. “Why does the woman in the middle have your exact face?”
