Chapter 10 - The Letter He Never Opened
I couldn’t make myself touch it.
“You kept it?”
Salvatore nodded.
“But you didn’t read it.”
“My brother had died.
Carlo was handling the family office.
He said people were using Rosalia’s name.”
I stared at him.
“My mother put a stamp on this.
She went to a mailbox.
She thought somebody would help.”
His mouth trembled.
“I know.”
“No.
You don’t.”
Rachel asked permission to open the envelope.
I gave it.
Inside were copies of forged payment receipts and a short letter.
Mr. Vitiello,
I am not asking you for a gift.
I am asking you to look at what your family says we received.
My daughter works nights and wants to become a nurse.
I don’t want her life spent paying for what someone else took.
If you remember my grandmother, please call me yourself.
My mother’s phone number appeared beneath her name.
I still knew it by heart.
For eight years, I’d been angry at her old car.
At the rain.
At myself for missing her last call because I was working.
Now I had an unopened envelope to hate.
Mateo moved toward me, then stopped.
I appreciated the stopping.
“I need air,” I said.
Outside, I sat on the front steps and cried without trying to make it quiet.
Rachel sat beside me.
Mateo stayed inside.
When I could breathe again, Detective Harris called Rachel.
Paul had agreed to give a statement with his attorney present.
He admitted collecting my mother’s car from the garage on Carlo’s instructions.
He’d left it overnight at a company warehouse before returning it to her.
He claimed he didn’t know what happened there.
“But he kept something,” Rachel told me after the call.
“A payment record and messages telling him what to say after the crash.”
I wiped my face.
“Where?”
“In a safe at Bellori.”
Before we could answer, Nadia came down the steps with her phone in her hand.
May you like
The restaurant’s alarm company had just called.
Someone had entered the building using Paul’s emergency code.
