Chapter 3: What the Locket Remembered
Vincent stood up slowly.
He didn't look at the guests.
He didn't look at Vivian.
He looked only at Clara, still on her knees on the marble floor, one hand pressed to the marks on her shoulder.
"Can you stand?" he asked.
Clara nodded.
She pushed herself upright, and her legs held, barely.
"Come with me."
"Vincent." Vivian's voice had changed.
The softness was gone.
"You are not leaving your own engagement party with a server."
"Watch me."
He placed himself between Clara and the room and walked her toward the side corridor that led to the private offices.
Two hundred guests watched them go.
Nobody moved to stop them.
Nobody spoke.
The door closed behind them.
The corridor was narrow and lit by a single row of recessed lights.
Clara stood with her back against the wall, her uniform still damp from the spilled wine, her shoulder aching in a way she was trying not to show.
Vincent turned to face her.
"Show me the locket again."
She lifted it from beneath her collar and held it out.
He didn't take it.
He just looked, holding his phone beside it so he could compare.
The photo on his phone showed a woman in her forties, dark-haired, standing in a garden.
Around her neck was a locket.
The same chain.
The same oval face.
The same small engraved pattern — a single olive branch, curving left.
"My grandmother had that commissioned for two women," Vincent said.
"My mother, Lucia.
And her closest friend, a woman named Rosa." He paused.
"Rosa Moretti, before she married.
She took the name Reyes when she left Italy."
Clara went very still.
"My mother's name was Elena Reyes," she said.
"Her mother — my grandmother — was Rosa."
"Rosa died in 2004."
"Yes."
Vincent looked at her for a long moment.
"Then your grandmother and my mother were raised in the same house for eleven years.
My grandmother took Rosa in when her own family couldn't keep her.
They called each other sisters because that's what they were."
Clara's hand closed around the locket.
"My mother never told me any of this," she said.
"She only told me the locket had been a gift.
That it was the most important thing she owned.
That I should never sell it, no matter what."
"Did she tell you anything about the Moretti family?"
"No." Clara shook her head.
"She died when I was nineteen.
There wasn't much time for old stories."
Something shifted in Vincent's face.
Not pity — something quieter than that.
"How long have you been working through the agency?"
"Eight months."
"Is this the kind of work you want to be doing?"
Clara looked at him.
"With respect, that's a strange question to ask someone you just met on the floor of your engagement party."
His mouth moved.
It wasn't quite a smile, but it was close.
"Fair," he said.
A knock came at the corridor door.
Sharp.
Three times.
Vincent didn't move toward it.
The knock came again, harder.
"Vincent." Vivian's voice, from the other side.
Controlled, but only just.
"Our guests are waiting.
Whatever this is, it can wait until tomorrow."
He looked at the door.
Then back at Clara.
"It cannot," he said — not loudly, but clearly enough to carry through the wood.
Silence from the other side.
Then footsteps, retreating.
Vincent turned back to Clara.
"I need to make a call.
There's a sitting room at the end of this corridor.
Will you wait there?"
"You don't have to do anything for me," Clara said.
"I should go.
I'll collect my things and—"
"You're not going anywhere tonight," he said.
"Not until someone has looked at your shoulder."
She opened her mouth.
"Please," he added.
She closed it again.
He walked her to the sitting room, opened the door, and left her there with a glass of water and the quiet.
Then he stepped back into the corridor, pulled out his phone, and made a call.
"Marco," he said, when the line picked up.
"I need you to pull everything we have on a woman named Rosa Reyes, née Moretti.
Born approximately 1941, emigrated from Calabria sometime in the late 1960s." A pause.
"Yes, tonight.
And Marco — keep this between us."
He hung up.
May you like
Down the corridor, behind the ballroom doors, he could hear the sound of two hundred guests beginning to murmur.
He didn't go back in.
