Chapter 8: The Morning After
The guests had gone by midnight.
The ballroom staff cleared the tables in near-silence, moving around the untouched champagne tower and the flower arrangements that had cost more than Clara made in a month.
Nobody asked where the hosts were.
Nobody seemed to want to know.
Vincent had arranged a car for Clara.
She had refused it twice before accepting on the condition that it take her home and nothing else.
"I don't need anything from you," she had said, standing in the corridor with her jacket over her uniform and her locket back beneath her collar.
"I know," he said.
"The car is not about need.
It's about the fact that it's nearly midnight and you were hjt twice with a leather strap at my party and the least I can do is make sure you get home safely."
She had looked at him for a moment.
Then she got in the car.
He called her the next morning at nine.
She picked up on the fourth ring.
"I want to meet with you and my attorney," he said.
"Today if possible.
There are things you need to understand about what was taken from your family, and I'd rather you hear them from someone who can explain the legal situation clearly."
"Mr.
Moretti—"
"Vincent."
A pause.
"Vincent.
I'm a twenty-three-year-old server.
I don't have money for attorneys."
"My attorney will be representing the estate's interests in correcting a fraudulent amendment.
You don't need your own attorney for this meeting.
You just need to be there."
Another pause, longer.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked.
He thought about his mother's handwriting.
The leftward slant of every letter she had ever written him.
The way she had spoken about loyalty and debt and the people who had made the family what it was, back when he was young enough to think those were just stories.
"Because my mother wanted it done," he said.
"And she ran out of time."
Clara was quiet for a moment.
"Alright," she said.
"What time?"
They met at two o'clock in Vincent's attorney's office — a quiet room on the fourteenth floor with a long table and a view of the city that Clara spent exactly three seconds looking at before turning her attention to the documents laid out in front of her.
Ferrante, Vincent's attorney, walked her through it carefully.
The original codicil.
The forged amendment.
The Calabrian property.
The land development application filed by Castellano Holdings eight months earlier — the same month Clara had registered with the staffing agency that, she now understood, had been created specifically to put her in a room with Vincent Moretti under controlled circumstances.
"They wanted to see me," Clara said slowly.
"Before I could find out about any of this."
"We believe so," Ferrante said.
"If you had discovered the property dispute independently and come forward as a beneficiary, it would have been far more difficult to manage.
This way, they controlled the introduction."
"They didn't expect Vincent to stop her," Clara said.
"No," Ferrante said.
"I don't imagine they did."
Clara looked at the original codicil.
At Lucia Moretti's signature, leaning left, slightly uneven, written by a woman who was running out of time but had not run out of intention.
"What happens now?" she asked.
"We file a challenge to the amendment based on forensic evidence of signature irregularity," Ferrante said.
"Given the documentation Marco has assembled and the examiner's preliminary findings, we have strong grounds.
The Castellano firm will likely attempt to negotiate before it reaches a formal hearing."
"And the property?"
"If the challenge succeeds, the original codicil is reinstated.
You would be named as the beneficiary your grandmother was always meant to be." Ferrante paused.
"It won't be immediate.
But the direction is clear."
Clara sat back in her chair.
She looked at Vincent across the table.
"Your engagement party," she said.
"I'm sorry about that.
About how it ended."
"Don't be."
"You lost something last night."
"I lost something I should have looked at more carefully a long time ago," he said.
"That's different."
She nodded slowly.
Then she looked back at the codicil — at the name written there in her great-aunt's failing hand, the name of a woman she had never met but whose decision had set everything in motion.
Rosa Reyes, née Moretti.
Her grandmother's name, written by someone who had loved her.
"She remembered her," Clara said quietly.
"After all that time.
She still remembered."
"She never forgot," Vincent said.
"I think that's what the letters were about.
All those years of letters."
Clara's hand came up to the locket at her throat.
May you like
She didn't say anything else.
She didn't need to.
