Chapter 4 - THE FIRE THAT DIDN'T TELL THE TRUTH
I arrived at Priya Shah's office wearing the only blazer I owned and carrying a blue binder thick with documents. Luca Moretti arrived with no bodyguards inside the room, a baby carrier in one hand, and Sal Russo walking beside him.
It was the strangest meeting in the history of ordinary conference tables.
Priya introduced herself, explained her role, and told Luca that anything involving criminal allegations would need to be shared with Detective Delgado. Then she asked him to stop using his influence to make arrangements on my behalf without prior consent.
He nodded. “Understood.”
Priya looked faintly disappointed. I suspected she had been hoping for an argument.
Leo sat on a blanket beside the table gnawing determinedly on a rubber giraffe. The moment he saw me, he began bouncing in place and reaching.
“Hey, little man,” I whispered.
I crouched near him, and his fist closed around my finger.
Luca watched with an expression that made me uncomfortable. Not ownership. Not even affection, exactly. Something closer to grief colliding with curiosity.
“May I show you a recording?” he asked.
Priya nodded, and Luca opened a video on his phone.
It had been taken at the lake house months before the fire. The camera followed Isabel Moretti through a bright kitchen as she complained laughingly about somebody putting hot sauce in the baby puree. Leo, perhaps three months old, sat in a high chair making delighted squealing noises.
Then a second woman stepped into frame.
Marina.
My sister.
She was older than me by seven years, with the same dark eyes and the same crooked mouth. Her hair was tied back in a messy bun. She wore scrub pants and an oversized sweater, and she moved toward Leo with the practiced confidence of someone who understood babies better than adults.
She hummed.
Three notes. A pause. Four more.
Leo stopped fussing immediately.
I felt the room shift.
I knew that tune.
I had hummed it without thinking my entire life.
Miriam used to call it my mystery song. She said I sang it the first night I came to live with her, too frightened to sleep and too young to explain where it came from.
On the screen Marina lifted the baby into her arms. Isabel smiled at them both.
“Say hi to Auntie Avery if she ever finds us,” Isabel said teasingly.
Marina laughed. “She will. I just know she will.”
The video ended.
I had been holding my breath.
Luca watched me carefully. “Do you recognize the song?”
I nodded, but I couldn't speak.
Priya slid a glass of water toward me. I took it with both hands and drank before answering.
“My foster mother said I sang it when I was little. I still do sometimes.”
Sal looked toward the window as if he needed a moment to himself.
“Marina searched for you for years,” he said finally. “Isabel helped her. They met when Marina was training as a pediatric nurse. My family paid for several search efforts because Marina had been helping care for Isabel during a complicated pregnancy.”
“Why didn't she find me?”
“Your early records were sealed after the death of your mother. There were changes of placement and, apparently, a deliberate alteration to your surname. Marina found three false leads before she came close to the truth.”
I looked at Priya. “Deliberate alteration?”
“We're reviewing the original order,” she said. “I won't speculate until we see it.”
I appreciated her restraint, though every cell in my body wanted her to speculate immediately.
Luca placed another photograph on the table. This one showed Isabel holding Leo beside a dark wooden pier. Marina stood behind them, laughing in the wind. It had been taken weeks before the fire.
“Isabel and Marina became close,” he said. “Marina was the only person who could calm Leo when he had colic. Isabel trusted her more than she trusted most people in our household. I did too.”
“What happened at the lake house?” I asked.
Luca stared at the photograph.
“I was in New York meeting investors. Isabel had gone up for the weekend with Leo and Marina. There was an electrical fire after midnight. Our security system failed. The housekeeper got Leo out through the kitchen and handed him to a driver. She couldn't go back for the others because the roof began collapsing.”
“And Isabel?”
“They found remains.” He swallowed. “The identification came through dental records. Marina's death was assumed because her phone, jewelry, and clothing were recovered near the burned north wing, but they never identified her remains.”
I looked at him sharply. “They never found her body?”
“No.”
“Then why did everybody tell you she died?”
“Because there was no credible sign she survived. We searched the property and surrounding area for days. Police searched too. I believed it because I couldn't imagine she would leave Leo voluntarily.”
The last sentence carried guilt so heavy it made his voice crack.
I thought of Marina on the screen, laughing while she hummed to a baby who adored her.
“She wouldn't have,” I said.
Luca nodded slowly. “I don't think so either.”
Sal finally spoke. “There's another thing you should know, Avery. Four months ago, just before the fire, Marina asked me for help locating a former social worker named Helen Carr. She believed Helen was responsible for separating you two and falsifying the records.”
“Did she find her?”
“She said she had an appointment. Then the fire happened.”
Priya wrote down the name. “We'll request any available records and check whether Ms. Carr is still licensed.”
Leo made a frustrated noise and threw his rubber giraffe to the floor.
I picked it up, wiped it, and handed it back. He smiled at me with such immediate trust that I had to look away.
“Why didn't you tell me about that meeting earlier?” I asked Sal.
He looked ashamed. “I thought it was unrelated to Isabel's death. I gave Marina the number and forgot about it. When the fire happened, I was grieving. By the time I remembered, I convinced myself the lead was meaningless.”
I stared at him. “You people have a remarkable talent for convincing yourselves things are meaningless.”
He accepted the words without protest.
We spent another hour reviewing documents. Priya made a list of requests. Luca agreed to provide the original fire investigation report to Detective Delgado through counsel. I signed authorization for my adoption records to be examined. Nobody promised a miracle.
Then Luca asked if he could speak to me privately for two minutes in the office's small waiting area, with the door open.
Priya raised an eyebrow. I nodded.
He stood beside the vending machine, looking out of place beneath a poster about estate planning.
“I know I've brought trouble to your life,” he said. “I'm sorry.”
“Trouble found me before I met you.”
“Maybe. But some of the men who work for me have made my life a dangerous place to stand near. I understand if you want distance.”
I thought of the threatening photograph and the stolen shoebox. I thought of Marina's humming and Leo's little hand around my finger.
“I want answers,” I said. “And I want you to keep Leo safe. If that means I stay away from him for a while, I'll do it.”
Luca looked as though I'd struck something tender.
“I haven't been doing that well enough,” he said quietly.
“You didn't know.”
“That's what scares me.”
Before I could respond, Sal appeared in the doorway holding his phone. His face was pale.
“Luca. The insurance investigator called. The fire report has a problem.”
Luca straightened. “What problem?”
Sal swallowed. “The dental records used to identify Isabel weren't obtained from her dentist. They were supplied by a private medical records contractor.”
“Who approved the contractor?” Luca asked.
Sal stared at him for a moment before answering.
“Enzo.”
Enzo Moretti.
Luca's cousin. The executive responsible for his freight division.
The man Luca had trusted with the business while he tried to survive losing his wife.
Leo began fussing in the conference room behind us.
May you like
And in the quiet waiting area of a lawyer's office, I watched Luca Moretti realize that the person who had helped bury his wife's remains might also be the person who arranged for her death.
As we returned to the conference room, I paused beside the window and watched Leo trying to chew the ear of his rubber giraffe. I realized I had been searching for one definitive explanation, the kind that would rearrange every broken piece of my life into a neat pattern. But the truth was gathering in layers instead. A sister who had loved me. A mother whose warnings had been ignored. A frightened social worker. A wealthy family divided between what it knew and what it preferred not to know. And a baby who could not possibly understand that his brief, uncomplicated happiness had forced adults to ask questions they had avoided for years. I thought about the many caretakers who had passed through my childhood. Some had been kind. Some had merely been tired. None of them could have imagined that a lullaby would one day lead me to this room. It made the world feel at once smaller and infinitely more complicated.
