Chapter 6: What His Father Wrote
Lorenzo held the envelope for a long time without opening it.
Celeste had been escorted to a guest room under Fausto's watch — not a cell, not the street, but a room with a locked door and a man outside it.
Dr.
Ferrara sat across the desk, the safe's contents spread and catalogued before her, and she did not rush him.
The handwriting was his father's.
Gianluca Rinaldi had died two years before the accident, and Lorenzo had not seen that handwriting since the last birthday card, which had said only: *You already know everything you need.
Trust it.*
He opened the envelope.
The letter was three pages.
His father's hand, dense and careful.
He read it once without stopping.
Then he set it down.
"He knew," Lorenzo said.
Dr.
Ferrara waited.
"He knew about the Genova transfers.
He knew they were irregular.
He wrote this two months before he died." Lorenzo looked at the pages.
"He arranged the engagement because Celeste's family had the documentation and threatened to go to the board.
He thought — he believed — that bringing her into the family was the safest way to keep it contained.
He thought she was manageable."
"He was wrong," Dr.
Ferrara said.
"He was wrong." Lorenzo was quiet for a moment.
"He also wrote that he was sorry.
That he should have told me.
That he was afraid I would try to fight it and get hurt."
He looked at the letter again.
"He was trying to protect me," he said.
"Badly.
But that's what he was doing."
Dr.
Ferrara took off her reading glasses.
"The Genova transfers — how irregular are we talking?"
"Irregular enough that they would have been embarrassing.
Not crjminal, I think.
Not on their own.
But embarrassing, and in the wrong hands, damaging." He folded the letter carefully.
"Celeste's family understood that.
They used it to get her into this house.
And then she decided that wasn't enough."
"She wanted the company."
"She wanted to run it.
Through Marco, through the clause, through a husband who would have come back to find everything already arranged." He set the letter aside.
"My father gave her the door.
She built a house behind it."
Dr.
Ferrara looked at the documents.
"The fabricated ones are obvious once you know what to look for.
The signatures don't match the period.
The paper stock is wrong for the dates." She set one down.
"She's clever, but she's not a forger.
She was counting on no one looking closely."
"Because I was in a wheelchair and Marco was cooperative and she had Edoardo in the prosecutor's office."
"Yes."
Lorenzo stood up.
Slowly, carefully, both hands on the desk.
His legs held.
He walked to the window.
Six steps.
He counted them without meaning to.
Outside, the garden was dark.
The east wing extension — Celeste's renovation, the wider doors, the ramp, the side entrance she had kept a key for — was visible from here as a shadow against the main building.
"I want an independent toxicologist," he said.
"Not connected to any of my existing medical team.
I want the capsule analyzed and a full report on what it is, what it does, and what a fourteen-month exposure would mean for recovery prospects."
"I can have someone here by tomorrow afternoon."
"I also want everything Celeste gave us tonight reviewed by a forensic document examiner before we do anything with it.
I want to know exactly what's real and what she constructed."
"Understood."
"And I want to know everything about Edoardo.
His position, his cases, whether he has any formal connection to anything touching the Rinaldi name in the last two years."
Dr.
Ferrara was writing.
"This is going to take a few days to build properly."
"Then we build it properly." He turned from the window.
"I spent fourteen months being managed.
I'm not going to rush the next fourteen days and hand them something to work with."
She nodded.
She began gathering the documents into her case.
"Dr.
Ferrara," he said.
She looked up.
"The physio team.
The three specialists who told me recovery was impossible.
I want to know if any of them were contacted by Celeste or Marco.
Payments, consultations, anything."
She went still.
"You think the medical assessment was also—"
"I think a woman who planned this carefully did not leave the medical opinion to chance." He looked at the wheelchair in the corner of the room.
He had not sat back in it since he stood up in the sunroom.
"I stood up today.
Two steps.
My legs shook but they held.
That is not what permanent nerve damage looks like."
Dr.
Ferrara looked at him for a moment.
Then she wrote it down.
She left at one in the morning.
Lorenzo sat in the chair behind his desk — a regular chair, not the wheelchair — and looked at his father's letter.
*You already know everything you need.
Trust it.*
He had not known.
He had trusted the wrong people, believed the wrong assessments, sat in a chair for fourteen months while his life was quietly redistributed around him.
But a seven-year-old girl had sat in a corner watching things.
And she had found what fourteen months of blindness had missed in fourteen seconds.
He picked up his phone and sent a message to Rosa: *Please bring Mia to the estate tomorrow afternoon.
I would like to thank her properly.
Both of you.*
He set the phone down.
Then he stood up again, alone in the room, and walked to the door and back.
Eight steps this time.
May you like
His legs shook the whole way.
He didn't stop.
