Chapter 3 - THE SECOND KEY
My hands were shaking so badly that Mr. Petrov gently reached out and took the bakery box from me.
He set the prune cake down on the corner of the cedar potting table, right beside the chipped blue teacup.
“Answer me, Emma,” Luca said.
He wasn’t shouting. Men like Luca Moretti didn’t need to shout. The quiet in his voice was far more terrifying.
Vanessa stared from the photograph in Luca’s hand to my face, her pale skin flushing crimson. “Wait. Reed? Your last name is Reed?”
I couldn’t look at her. I kept my eyes on the black-and-white picture of my mother smiling beside Clara Moretti.
“That’s my mom,” I whispered. “Sarah Reed.”
“She worked here?” Luca asked, stepping closer.
“I didn’t know,” I said, and it was the truth. “She died when I was nine. My father told me she worked at a botanical conservatory on the North Side before I was born. He never once mentioned the Moretti name.”
“Of course he says that now,” Vanessa cut in, her voice sharp with panic and suspicion. “Luca, look at what’s happening! An old man who disappeared for years shows up on our engagement night, and the maid working in your house just happens to be the daughter of the woman in that photo? You’re being set up!”
Luca’s jaw flexed. He looked at me, and for a cold, sickening second, the vulnerability was gone. The ruthless head of the Moretti family stood in its place.
“How long have you worked in my house, Emma?”
“Eight months, sir.”
“Who hired you?”
“Mrs. Gable, the head housekeeper. Through the staffing agency on Dearborn.”
“And your father never told you about my mother?”
“My father had a massive stroke two years ago,” I said, anger finally cutting through my fear. “He can barely speak three words in a row without losing his breath. And if I knew my mother had any connection to a family like yours, Mr. Moretti, this is the last house in Chicago I would have cleaned toilets in.”
Mr. Petrov cleared his throat quietly.
“She’s telling the truth, Luca,” the old man said. “Emma didn’t know. I didn’t know she worked here either until your fiancée shouted her name in the dining room.”
Luca looked at the old gardener. “Then why does the back of this picture say Sarah has the second key?”
Mr. Petrov walked around the table and pointed to the bottom of the cedar cigar box.
Beneath the stack of garden ledgers was a false wooden floor with a tiny brass keyhole no bigger than a shirt button.
“Your mother had two keys made by a locksmith in Pilsen,” Mr. Petrov said. “One large brass key for the greenhouse door, which she gave to me. And a small silver key for the compartment inside this box, which she entrusted to Sarah Reed three days before the crash.”
I stared at the tiny keyhole.
Then my hand rose slowly to the hollow of my throat, beneath the collar of my black uniform blouse.
All my life, I had worn a thin silver chain my father put around my neck the day of my mother’s funeral. Hanging from it was a tiny, flat silver charm shaped like a willow leaf, with a jagged little notch at the bottom.
My father had told me it was the key to my mother’s childhood diary, lost in a house fire years ago.
Slowly, I hooked a finger under the chain and pulled it out from my blouse.
The overhead light caught the tarnished silver leaf.
Nobody breathed.
Vanessa took a half-step backward, her heel catching on a cracked floor tile.
“May I?” Luca asked quietly.
My fingers trembled as I unclasped the chain and placed it in his palm.
Luca knelt beside the cedar box, aligned the notched tip of the willow leaf with the tiny brass lock, and turned it.
A crisp click echoed through the quiet greenhouse.
He lifted the false wooden floor.
Underneath lay no money and no jewelry. There was only a yellowed envelope from St. Jude’s Women’s Clinic, a receipt from an auto repair yard in Cicero, and a small white drawstring pouch made of linen.
Luca opened the auto yard receipt first.
Wait—it wasn’t a repair receipt. It was a cash dispersal slip from Bellini Shipping & Logistics, dated October 17, 2000, signed by Arthur Bellini.
Vanessa’s father.
“My father did business with your father for twenty years!” Vanessa blurted before Luca even spoke. “A shipping receipt proves nothing!”
Luca didn’t answer. He set the slip down and opened the small white linen pouch, tipping its contents onto the dark cedar wood.
Out rolled a tiny, braided hospital bracelet made of faded pink and white plastic beads, and a lock of baby hair tied with thread.
I stared at the beads.
They spelled out a name: ELENA MORETTI.
Date of birth: October 12, 1998.
Luca’s breath left him in a ragged gasp. He braced both hands on the edge of the table, his knuckles turning white.
“I didn’t have a sister,” he said, his voice cracking like a boy’s. “I was eight years old in 1998. My mother went to Lake Geneva that autumn for her lungs. She was gone for four months.”
“She wasn’t in Lake Geneva, Luca,” Mr. Petrov said softly, his eyes glistening with tears. “Your father had enemies closing in from New York. Clara was terrified someone would use a baby against the family. Only three people knew why she left the city: me, Sarah Reed, who nursed her through the delivery, and Evelyn Bellini, her closest friend.”
Luca picked up the tiny beaded bracelet. “What happened to my sister?”
Mr. Petrov’s shoulders sagged. “We were told the baby died of a heart defect at two years old, the same week your parents’ car went into the river.”
I wasn’t looking at the bracelet anymore.
I had picked up the yellowed clinical record from St. Jude’s that had been tucked beneath the pouch.
At the bottom was a pediatrician’s chart recording a toddler’s emergency blood transfusion on October 15, 2000—along with the baby’s birthmark description: a crescent-shaped cluster of three moles just behind the left ear.
My heart slammed against my ribs.
I dropped the paper back onto the table and backed away from all three of them.
May you like
Because three crescent-shaped moles sat right behind my own left ear.
And according to my birth certificate at home, I was born on October 12, 1998.
