Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
AMELIA
On the third floor of Mr. Moriarty’s mansion, a shuttered room held many splendid things, most notably a finely wrought table with iron legs and a green marble top. Gold-vein ran through the slab, but the crown jewel sat atop—a black rotary phone.
The sleek thing teemed with temptation, and Amelia admired it at first because there was no harm in just looking.
The cord had coiled on itself, so she righted it, but her fingertips caressed the handset, and the dial tone purred in her ear.
It’s just a touch, she thought, but that touch longed for more.
Amelia dialed the first five digits of her father’s number, but there were too many sevens and nines, so the mechanical churn cranked on her heart, and her nervous breath hitched with no words to say.
Hi Dad. I’m alright. I’m doing just fine.
In the end, she didn’t complete the call. Shuttered spaces were abandoned for good reason, so Amelia left it alone and straddled a divide bridged by shame. Shame she dialed the first half of her father’s number. Shame she couldn’t dial the rest.
Four days passed since the abandoned call, and the mansion stirred with Gio’s funeral preparations.
Each day brought new faces—men with strained eyes and deep scowls; elegant women and their cherub-cheeked children.
The men nursed their grief in the basement with cards and booze.
The women gathered in the kitchen for white wine and gossip.
Amelia roamed the liminal space between.
Most funerals these days were couched as a celebration of life.
The dead didn’t need anyone’s sorrow, and perhaps the living didn’t know how to cope with it.
Night after night, mourners celebrated Gio’s life but ignored the grisly circumstances of his death.
In the basement lounge, the men undoubtedly picked it apart and examined it fully.
The women, on the other hand, refused to acknowledge it altogether.
“Gio was murdered, and we almost died too,” Amelia had reminded Mirabelle. “Are we supposed to just forget?”
“The men haven’t forgotten,” was her reply. “It’s not our place to nag them about it.”
Their place, apparently, was to arrange charcuterie boards, chill the wine, light the candles. They created an illusion of normalcy for men who lived in a world that was anything but.
Those first few nights, Amelia obliged the invitation to socialize and smiled with timid grace as she tried to fit in.
Most of the women regarded her with staid aloofness that didn’t reject her outright but still held her at arm’s length.
Many already knew who she was, and her story passed on red lipstick whispers when they thought she couldn’t hear.
She heard just fine.
The men weren’t much better. Their verdict of her was gaussian.
The majority middle were apathetic, but a handful paid her hostility that silently warned her to fall in line.
The other minority pitied her, but from some distant shore like onlookers to a shipwreck.
Then there was Emory. These days, chaos and duty nipped at his heels.
He’d linger long enough to tell her hello and ask how she was before something else demanded his attention.
Amelia thought of him in peaceful moments where her heart hurt less.
Of all her daydreams, the ones of him were the most comforting and sweet.
By night, she thought of him in other ways—rough palms parting soft thighs, kisses lush as he filled her up, warmth as he came inside her.
Amelia would fall asleep soaked between the legs but never quite satisfied with her own touch.
As Mirabelle tended to the day’s festivities, Amelia shirked her own duty to fit in and curled up with a book in the room of splendid things. When the black phone rang, it scared her half to death only because she still didn’t have any words to say.
Hi Dad. I miss you. I dreamt of Mom again.
It wouldn’t be him. Of course not. But temptation and guilt were strange bedfellows, and Amelia felt she ought to atone for her dalliance with the phone.
She put on a poppy-colored sun dress and made herself pretty for the judgmental shrews downstairs.
“Hold your head high, sweet baby,” her momma would have said, but Amelia only ever saw her mother in dreams. In the waking world, she carried on alone.
She crossed the foyer where the stained-glass dome above dazzled in a kaleidoscope of color. The parlor clock kept time with her steps, but music pulled her into the hall of photographs where Bob Dylan drifted from the basement lounge.
She hadn’t been down there since her first night at the Moriarty mansion.
To remember it was like plunging into a past life.
The cuts and bruises had faded, but Amelia healed up differently on the inside.
The pieces fit together again, but the picture was no longer the same.
At the other end of the hall, someone eclipsed the sunlight streaming from the great room.
Emory.
Amelia didn’t have to look. His presence spoke for itself in a language she knew well—the grace of his gait unusual in such a tall man and the intensity he wore like a well-tailored suit.
Emory approached with his hands behind his back. He smelled of spiced cologne and the fresh-pressed linen of his white button-up shirt. His skin was a deeper bronze, as if time in the sun had treated him well, and his hair hung in loose waves about his shoulders.
“Don’t you wanna be with the others?” he asked.
The question vibrated like long-ago days of solitude on the swing set and her father’s car rumbling up to an empty school playground. “Why aren’t you with your friends, Amelia?”
She shook her head as butterflies battered her composure and squandered all the clever things she might say.
“Not particularly. Don’t you wanna be down there?”
Amelia motioned to the dying lines of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” lilting from the basement.
Emory mulled it over with a handsome smile.
There he stood with the ease of a man who’d shed his duty, if only for the night.
And there she stood, pulling apart at the seams because her crushes always started the same way—so shy, it whittled her breath to a whisper in her chest then dropped her eyes and stilled her tongue.
“Not particularly,” he said. “It’s too loud, too…”
“Crowded?”
“Precisely.” He drifted closer, his smile fading. “I was actually coming to look for you. Mirabelle said you’ve seemed distant the past few days. Is everything alright?”
Another echo of paternal wisdom. “You’d be happier with your head out of the clouds and feet on the ground.” To her father, pragmatism was a virtue. Daydreams were not. She was an aberration under some other man’s roof, and like her father, perhaps Emory intended to chide her about it.
Amelia crossed her arms and took up her own defense. “I’m fine. I just needed some space.”
It wasn’t a lie, just absurd. No one clamored for her company. She was a stranger shoved in the corner, the houseplant someone forgot to water. Did it matter why she wilted? It must’ve to him. Sincerity gentled Emory’s voice.
“Take whatever space you need. I just wanted to give you this.”
He revealed what was behind his back—a black leather notebook with A. Havick stamped in the bottom corner. On top was a polished fountain pen with ivy leaves carved into the brass body.
“It’s for your poetry,” he said, his fingers brushing hers as the notebook exchanged hands. “I thought you could use it to write.”
Emory stared at her lips but licked his own.
It seemed neither had forgotten their kiss in the courtyard, fleeting as it was.
Like a precious jewel, Amelia had examined every facet of it—the surprising softness of his lips, his hair sweeping her cheek, his strong arms holding her close.
She wanted to gush about it to someone and deconstruct the moment to relive it again.
There was no one to humor her, though, so Amelia buried it like a secret by day and unearthed it each night.
“Emory, thank you. It’s gorgeous,” she said and stroked the notebook as sleek as that black phone and the pen’s body gleaming like the rotary dial. Her heart sank with rediscovered guilt, and she cleared a tickle in her throat. “I feel like I don’t deserve it.”
“Of course, you do,” he laughed with a folded brow, apparently flummoxed at her modesty. “If anything, I’d say you deserve far more.”
Emory stalled and his hands disappeared into his pockets. Any other day, it would’ve marked the natural end to their rendezvous, and he’d be on his way to wherever his men had gathered.
“This was always my favorite part of the house,” he said instead, and Amelia followed his gaze to the photographs lining the hall.
The confession surprised her. The Moriarty mansion was palatial and lavishly appointed, every part meant for admiration.
“Really? But everything here is so beautiful.”
“That’s the point, I guess. This part is simple, nostalgic.”
There it was again, Emory and his need for simplicity. He studied a photo of a woman cradling a baby on the porch of a bungalow home. She was a paragon of fifties glamour with black curls and ruby red lips.
“Who is that?” Amelia asked.
“Liam’s mom.” Emory pointed to the next frame where a scowling soldier puffed out his chest. “This is his dad, Joseph, in Vietnam.”
“How then did this all start?”
Amelia gestured to the mansion, the symbol of the Moriartys. Everything she knew about them came from her father. It wasn’t what he told her that shaped her perception, but his quiet vexation rife with rage.