Chapter 3 - Four Years of Unsaid Things
Rosa's apartment in Yonkers had one bedroom and windows that stuck in humid weather. She set Lily's shoes beside the radiator and found her sister Maribel at the sink rinsing strawberries.
"You left early," Maribel said. "Please tell me the mansion didn't burn down."
"Not the whole thing."
Lily ran to her aunt. "Bella lady yelled."
Maribel's expression sharpened. "What happened?"
Rosa waited until Lily had settled on the living-room rug with Bun. Then she told her sister about the hallway, the button, the question Alessandro had finally asked.
"Well," Maribel said, "there goes the world's longest secret."
"It wasn't a game."
"I know. I'm the person who held your hand during the ultrasound."
Four years earlier Rosa had started temporary housekeeping at the estate. Alessandro was home for one rare, quiet winter. Their first conversation happened over a broken kitchen freezer, when he carried boxes of food into the cold pantry instead of telling someone else to do it.
"You don't have to do that," she had told him.
"Neither do you. It's nearly midnight."
"I get paid by the hour. What's your excuse?"
He had smiled then, startled into being human.
They talked beside the herb garden, over espresso, and on snow-covered back steps. One night she asked whether a relationship could be honest while his name was attached to her paycheck.
"I won't ask you to risk your job," he said.
"Then don't ask me to pretend you have no power here."
They had spent one weekend together after he offered to transfer her reporting line and Rosa chose, against her better judgment, to trust him. On Monday Giorgio Moretti returned from Italy. The meetings began again. Alessandro stopped appearing at the back steps.
When Rosa confronted him, he said, "I can't make promises while my family is at war."
"I didn't ask for diamonds," she replied. "I asked you to show up."
He did not.
Weeks later, Rosa learned she was pregnant. She wrote his number on a slip of paper and stared at it every night. Then a family chauffeur who sometimes carried her home was hospitalized after an attack unrelated to Rosa. His young son waited outside the emergency room until dawn.
Rosa looked at her positive test and made a decision she would question for years.
"You could have left the estate," Maribel said now.
"And found what? A job that paid enough for rent, childcare, and Mom's medical bills back then? Bruno kept me on when I needed it. Alessandro was away most of the time."
"You still might have told him."
"Yes." Rosa met her sister's eyes. "And he still might have been better than I expected. I don't know. That's what makes it hard."
Her phone buzzed. An unfamiliar number displayed a simple message.
Mr. Moretti would like permission to send a family-law attorney. No action will be taken without your consent.
Maribel read it over her shoulder.
"That sounds almost normal," she said.
Rosa typed back: I will choose my own attorney first.
An answer came quickly.
Understood.
May you like
Then another message arrived, this one from an unknown sender.
You should have kept your daughter out of the front hallway.
