Chapter 4 - The Diamond Bracelet Planted In My Coat Pocket And The Security Tape Vanessa Thought She Paid To Erase
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By eleven o'clock that night, heavy October rain had begun lashing against the arched windows of the third floor.
We had pushed the three Swiss shipping trunks out into the back hallway so Benjamin wouldn't have to look at them, and Mrs. Carter had brought up fresh navy-blue flannel sheets and three extra down comforters from the linen closet.
Luca Moretti—a man who owned half the commercial real estate on Michigan Avenue and commanded fifty armed men across Illinois—was currently sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor in his silk dress socks, carefully gluing the broken plastic wing of Benjamin's model B-17 bomber back together with a tube of superglue.
Benjamin sat between us on a pile of pillows, a smudge of chocolate frosting on his chin, peering through his new wooden telescope at the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to his ceiling.
"Miss Rachel?" Benjamin asked sleepily, lowering the telescope. "How come you didn't let go of my balloon when Vanessa told you to fire yourself?"
I paused, holding a damp cloth I had been using to gently wipe the espresso grounds out of Barnaby's corduroy fur.
Across the rug, Luca's hands stilled on the model airplane.
He looked up at me from beneath his dark lashes, waiting for my answer just as intently as his son was.
"Because some things are worth more than a paycheck, Ben," I said softly, handing the clean bear back to him. "And nobody should ever have to spend their ninth birthday feeling like they don't matter."
"Vanessa said you only care about us because Daddy pays you," Benjamin murmured, tracing the engraved letters of his name on the wooden barrel of the telescope. "She told me last Tuesday that if Daddy stopped paying you, you wouldn't even remember my name."
My heart pinched.
So that was why Benjamin had been so quiet around me all week, barely speaking when I brought him his afternoon milk and cookies after school.
"Ben," I said, leaning closer so he could see my eyes. "Even if I worked a thousand miles away and never earned another dime in this house, I would still remember that your favorite constellation is Orion, that you hate crusts on your peanut butter sandwiches, and that September twenty-fourth is the most important day of the year."
A tiny smile broke across his tired face.
Then he yawned, his eyelids drooping heavily after hours of crying and emotional exhaustion.
"Daddy?" he whispered, leaning sideways against Luca's shoulder. "Are you going to call Mommy tomorrow and tell her I got the telescope?"
"I tried calling her cell twenty minutes ago, buddy," Luca said gently, setting the repaired airplane on the nightstand and lifting Benjamin onto the freshly made bed. "It went straight to voicemail. She's probably already asleep, so we'll call her first thing at breakfast."
"Okay," Benjamin murmured, curling around Barnaby and the wooden telescope as I pulled the navy comforter up to his chin.
Within two minutes, his breathing slowed into a deep, even rhythm.
I stood up quietly and began gathering the cake plates and dirty forks onto the silver tray.
"Rachel," Luca said softly, standing up beside the bed and motioning toward the hallway. "Leave the tray for a moment. Walk with me."
My pulse jumped, the familiar anxiety returning immediately now that Benjamin was asleep.
Had I overstepped when I talked back to Vanessa?
Or was he remembers what she had shouted at the end—her threat against my mother on South Halsted?
I followed him out into the third-floor corridor, pulling the bedroom door mostly shut so a sliver of hallway light still fell across the carpet.
Luca stopped under the crystal wall sconce and reached into his pocket, pulling out his phone.
"What is your mother's exact address on South Halsted?" he asked quietly.
I blinked in surprise. "Thirty-four sixteen, Apartment 2B. Why?"
His thumb moved rapidly across the screen before he hit send.
"Because Vanessa is spiteful when she's cornered, and her father employs men who don't mind breaking windows to prove a point," Luca said matter-of-factly. "I just assigned two of my men to sit in an unmarked sedan outside your mother's building until this is resolved. Nobody will touch her."
My breath caught in my throat.
For fourteen months, I had carried the crushing weight of my mother's medical bills, her rent, and her safety entirely on my own shoulders.
Hearing someone—especially a man like Luca Moretti—say nobody will touch her made my knees feel unexpectedly weak.
"Thank you, Mr. Moretti," I whispered, my eyes stinging. "You really didn't have to—"
Before I could finish, my attention was caught by the tall landing window at the end of the corridor, which overlooked the front wrought-iron gates three hundred yards down the driveway.
Through the sheets of pouring rain and the yellow glow of the security floodlights, a small, dented silver Honda Civic was parked diagonally outside the locked iron bars.
And standing in the pouring rain beside the intercom box, without an umbrella or a coat, was a slender blonde woman in a soaked blue cardigan, pounding her fists against the iron bars while the two new security guards stood inside the gatehouse shaking their heads at her.
I gasped, pressing my hand against the cold windowpane.
"Mr. Moretti," I breathed. "Look."
Luca stepped up behind me, his chest brushing my shoulder as he looked down through the rain-streaked glass.
"Is that—?"
"That's Caroline," I said, turning to him urgently. "That's Benjamin's mother! Why won't the guards let her in?"
Luca frowned darkly, already striding toward the staircase. "I told Marco not to let Vanessa or Victor near the gates. The new guards on the night shift must not recognize Caroline's car."
I hurried down the grand staircase right behind him, grabbing a heavy black golf umbrella and a dry wool shawl from the coat closet in the foyer as Luca yanked open the massive front doors.
Instead of waiting in the house, Luca walked straight out into the driving rain, taking the umbrella from my hands and holding it over both of us as we hurried down the long cobblestone drive toward the gates.
As we got closer, I could hear Caroline sobbing over the roar of the storm.
"Please!" she was crying at the burly guard standing under the gatehouse awning. "I don't care if you arrest me! I just need five minutes to tell my son I didn't abandon him! Please tell Luca I'll sign whatever he wants if he just lets me talk to Ben on the intercom!"
"Caroline!" Luca called out, hitting the master override code on the pillar keypad.
The heavy iron gates groaned open.
Caroline stumbled forward through the puddles, her soaked blonde hair plastered to her pale cheeks, her lips blue from the freezing October wind.
In her shaking hands, she wasn't holding a gift bag.
She was holding a folded sheaf of legal paper stamped with the seal of the Cook County Circuit Court, the ink running in the rain.
"Luca!" she choked out, falling to her knees on the wet cobblestones right in front of him. "Luca, please! I don't know what I did wrong, I swear to God I didn't break our custody agreement! I only came at three o'clock today to drop off his telescope at the door, I didn't ask to come to the party, I swear!"
Luca froze, the rain drumming violently against the black umbrella above us.
He dropped to one knee in the puddle without a single thought for his two-thousand-dollar tailored trousers, grabbing Caroline by the elbows to pull her up.
"Caroline, what the hell are you talking about?" he demanded, wrapping the dry wool shawl I was holding around her shivering shoulders. "What custody agreement?"
"This!" she sobbed, shoving the rain-soaked legal document against his chest. "A courier served me at my apartment at eight o'clock tonight! An emergency petition for sole custody and a temporary restraining order barring me from coming within a thousand feet of Benjamin or his school! And the letter attached—it said Ben told the family lawyer he doesn't want to see me anymore now that he has a real mother!"
My hand flew to my mouth.
Luca stared down at the wet papers in his hand.
Under the glare of the gatehouse floodlight, I could clearly see the letterhead at the top of the page: Bellini & Associates Legal Group.
Victor Bellini's law firm.
And right at the bottom of the emergency petition was the exact same stamped signature Vanessa had used on the Swiss boarding school enrollment form.
"And when I tried to call your cell phone all night to beg you to explain," Caroline wept, clutching at Luca's soaked shirtsleeve, "my number was blocked! My baby thinks I forgot his birthday, Luca! Please don't take him away from me!"
I looked at Luca's face.
The rain was running down his high cheekbones, his dark hair plastered to his forehead, and the look in his eyes was so dark, so lethal, that even the guard inside the gatehouse took a step backward.
"You weren't blocked on my phone, Caroline," I said gently, stepping forward and placing a warm hand on her freezing arm. "Miss Bellini had Mr. Moretti's phone in her clutch during the cocktail hour to 'check the seating chart.' She must have blocked your number while he was greeting the guests."
Caroline blinked up at me through the rain and her tears. "Rachel?"
"Come inside out of the cold, Mrs. Moretti," I said softly. "Benjamin has been asking for you all night. And he's sleeping upstairs right now with your wooden telescope in his arms."
Caroline let out a broken cry that tore right through my chest.
Luca stood up, slipping his arm around his ex-wife's trembling shoulders to support her while holding the umbrella over our heads.
"This paper is forged, Caroline," Luca said, his voice like grinding stones as we walked her up the steps into the warm, golden light of the mansion's foyer. "The engagement is off. Vanessa has been thrown out of this house. And by nine o'clock tomorrow morning, the lawyer who drafted this piece of garbage will never practice law in the state of Illinois again."
When we brought Caroline up to the third floor—after Mrs. Carter helped her into dry sweatpants and a warm sweater in the guest bathroom—I slowly pushed open the door to Benjamin's bedroom.
Benjamin stirred at the creak of the hinges, blinking sleepily against the hallway light.
"Miss Rachel?" he mumbled.
Then he saw the woman standing right behind me.
For two seconds, the nine-year-old boy didn't breathe.
He looked down at the wooden telescope in his hand, then back up at his mother's tear-stained face.
"Mommy?" he whispered, as if he were afraid she was part of a dream that would vanish if he spoke too loudly.
"Happy birthday, my sweet boy," Caroline whispered, rushing across the room and gathering him into her arms on the bed.
"Vanessa said you didn't want to come!" Benjamin cried, burying his face in her neck and holding on for dear life. "She said you were busy with your new life!"
"Never," Caroline wept, kissing the top of his dark head over and over. "I waited outside at three o'clock, baby, and I will never miss your birthday as long as I live."
I stood back in the shadow of the hallway, wiping a tear from my own cheek as I pulled the door half-shut to give them privacy.
Beside me in the dim corridor, Luca leaned his back against the mahogany paneling, watching his son and ex-wife through the crack in the door.
Then, slowly, he turned his head to look at me.
"She blocked Caroline's number on my phone," Luca murmured, his voice dangerously low. "She forged a restraining order to break Caroline's heart, and a boarding school contract to break Ben's. Why, Rachel? Even for a jealous woman, why go to this extreme to isolate my son before Saturday?"
Before I could answer, my foot brushed against something small and metallic that had rolled under the baseboard radiator just outside the walk-in closet door when Vanessa had fallen to her knees earlier.
I bent down and picked it up.
It wasn't a bobby pin or a piece of jewelry.
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It was a tiny silver USB flash drive attached to a small brass key—a key stamped with the numbers 409 and the logo of the First National Bank of Chicago.
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