Chapter 4 - WHAT HELENA REMEMBERED
The doctor said Helena had fainted after standing too quickly. Dante wanted her transferred to a hospital. Helena refused.
“I’m already in a room full of strangers,” she said. “I won’t trade it for another.”
Once the doctor left, Dante brought Isabela back to the bedside.
“You knew her mother,” he told Helena.
Helena looked from him to Isabela. “Marisa?”
Isabela sat down. “Yes.”
For a moment, Helena’s eyes cleared.
“Your mother was the best seamstress I ever knew,” she said. “She could look at a dress hanging in a shop window and make a better one by Sunday.”
Isabela swallowed. “She told me you gave her your wedding dress to alter.”
“I did. I liked her more than the dress.”
“What happened when she left?”
Helena gripped the blanket. “Augusto said she stole money.”
“My mother never stole from anyone.”
“I know that now.”
Dante turned toward his mother. “You told me she was fired.”
“That was what your father told everyone.”
“Why did you believe him?”
Helena’s voice broke. “Because he showed me a receipt. Because I was frightened. Because believing him was easier than asking her.”
Isabela pulled out her photograph and placed it on the bed. Helena touched the edge of it.
“I kept a copy,” she said.
“Where?”
Helena opened her palm. The brass key lay against her skin. “In the little desk in my old sewing room.”
That room had been locked since Augusto’s death six years earlier. Dante looked at the key.
“Why tell us now?”
“I tried to tell someone when I found the letter. Then I fell down the stairs.” Helena looked at Isabela. “After that, every time I woke up, someone said I’d imagined it.”
Rafael came to the door. “Dante. The camera outside this room went down before Mrs. Montenegro fell.”
Dante’s expression hardened. “When?”
May you like
“Six minutes before.”
Helena closed Isabela’s fingers around the key. “Open the desk,” she whispered. “Before they do.”
