Chapter 4

The basement air was cool and smelled of dust and old wood. Enzo had not been down here in years—the stairs were not accessible, and he had long since learned not to ask for things his body couldn't reach. But now, with the kitchen behind him and the house holding its breath, he found himself at the top of the basement steps, staring down into the dark.

He didn't know why he'd come here. The glass was in Tessa's room. The letter was in her locker. The lab was waiting for a sample he didn't have yet. But something pulled him to the basement, a thread of memory he couldn't quite grasp.

The stairs were steep, the rail worn smooth. He could not manage them alone. He had known he couldn't when he wheeled himself to the top, and yet here he was.

"Mr. Marchetti?"

Enzo turned. Tessa stood in the hallway behind him, a shoebox in her arms. Her face was pale, but her eyes were steady.

"I brought the glass," she said. "And the letter."

"Can you read it to me?"

She hesitated, then nodded, and opened the seam. The pages were yellowed, the handwriting neat and even. She began to read, her voice soft and steady, the words of a girl who had been twenty-two and terrified and certain she was losing her mind.

The letter was addressed to "Mr. Marchetti." It was dated eleven years ago, three months before Gia was born. It spoke of the glass, the sediment, the invisible classification of medications in her old pharmacy job. It spoke of the night she had cleaned the study and found the glass still cold, the powder settling in the bottom. It spoke of the medical file she'd found in his desk, the words "vascular event" and "irreversible" and the cold certainty that followed.

"I don't have proof," the letter said, "but I know what I saw. I know the difference between a liqueur residue and a powder that isn't supposed to be there. I'm afraid to tell you this, because I'm afraid of what it might mean. But I can't keep holding a secret that might be the reason you can't walk."

The letter ended with an apology and a request for a meeting. A date. A time.

"Did you give it to him?" Enzo asked.

Tessa shook her head. "I wrote it the week before her birth. I was going to deliver it the day I came back to work. But she came early, and I was in the hospital for five days, and when I came home, I found out that you had dismissed the entire staff."

Enzo's brow furrowed. "I what?"

"You dismissed the staff," Tessa repeated. "Not the groundskeepers or the kitchen—just the inside staff. I came back to work after my daughter was born, and the butler told me my position had been terminated. No explanation. No severance. Just a check and a note saying 'the house is being managed differently.'"

"I never dismissed anyone," Enzo said. "I never issued that order. I was—" He stopped. He had been in the middle of a year-long series of treatments, sedated and immobile, barely conscious of the world around him. It would have been easy for someone else to manage his affairs during that time.