2. Nine Years of Distance
Chapter two
Nine Years of Distance
Alex, The Bellamare Estate
Same Day, After the Reading
Alex, Until the Car Is Gone
The car rounds the coastal bend and disappears. He is taller and broader than I remembered. And more good looking. I turn from the window and go back to work.
Mamma taught me to count to ten between a feeling and a decision. I have never made it past seven. Today I made it to four.
Maxwell Grant.
The name of the man I left nine years ago without a word, the man I have kept from a truth I carry every day. The man I have spent four years keeping at a careful distance.
Back at my father's desk with the estate files open, my pen is moving down the priority list before the gravel on the drive has finished settling.
Dark hair, close-cut. A few threads of grey at the temple that were not there nine years ago. I write the next item on the list. But the inventory continues. The familiar jaw line. The piercing eye. Broader. Stiller. Dark eyes that give nothing away until they decide to…
Giulia sets a cup of coffee on the desk in front of me and takes the chair across from me, not the doorframe. She does not lean. She sits with the composed attention of someone in a board meeting.
Someone who has decided this matters and is not going to pretend otherwise.
She has the expression she uses when she has already formed a position and is giving the other person a chance to get there on their own.
“I knew him,” I say. “From a seminar at a university. A long time ago.”
“Vaguely,” Giulia says.
“Yes.”
Giulia is quiet for a moment. She looks at her coffee and then back at me. “And yet you stopped breathing when he walked in,” she says. “I noticed.”
“I was surprised. I didn’t know Grant and Associates had assigned someone I’d met before. He is not what I remembered.” I look back at the file.
“All right.” Giulia says it in the way that means: I am giving you this, for now.
She stands. She looks at me for a long moment before she does. The look she uses when she has decided not to say the thing she is thinking, which is not the same as not thinking it.
“There is a lot to get through this afternoon. I need you present.”
“I’m present,” I say.
"All right."
There it is again.
Giulia takes her coffee and goes. She stops at the door, turns around and looks at me. Three seconds. Then she goes. I listen to her footsteps on the stone floor, the quiet close of the sitting room door. I breathe.
The house settles back around me, and I sit alone with the clock on my father’s desk and the knowledge that Giulia’s “all right” will not last forever.
Matteo comes back at quarter past three. He drops his bag by the door and climbs into the chair across from me and opens his book, settling in with the easy certainty.
He tucks his left foot under his right knee and tilts the page toward the window light. I watch the line of his jaw. Have watched it for eight years, and I keep the thought that comes with it in a locked room at the back of my mind, the way I always have, and I look back at my files.
Alex, The Call
Once Matteo is at supper with Mrs. Henley, and Giulia has taken the brokerage files to the sitting room, I open the bottom drawer of my father’s desk.
The counsel contract. I have avoided reading it in full for four years, the way I avoid anything with his name on it: carefully, and with sustained effort. I read it now.
All twenty-two pages. I read without marking, retaining everything. By page fourteen I already know what Diana will tell me. I read to the end anyway, because I do not make decisions based on what a document probably says.
Diana picks up on the second ring.
“I need to talk through the counsel contract,” Alex says. “The full thing. I read it this afternoon.”
“I’m listening.”
The twelve-month clause, the assignment provision, the name on the account. I lay it all out. Diana listens without interrupting, which is one of the things I have always valued most about her. When I finish, the line is quiet.
“You’re bound,” Diana says. “And so is he.”
“Is there any mechanism to reassign the account to another partner?”
“Consent of both parties. Written.” A pause. “He would have to agree, Alex.”
“He won’t.”
“No,” Diana says quietly. “Not after today.”
A silence between us that has its own history. Four years of it.
“I kept finding reasons,” I say. “The timeline. The complexity. The Italian branch unresolved. There was always something that made the formal engagement not quite ready.”
“I know,” Diana says. “I helped you find some of them.”
“Yes.”
“And now it is ready.”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, It is.”
She does not ask what happened today. She does not need to. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “Thank you.”
The call ends. Sitting with what I know: what he saw in that room, the eight years I have spent preventing exactly that, and the fact that the one person I most needed not to see it has just seen it in a room I could not leave.
The journal. I open it and run my thumb over the Medici crest, the worn gilt of the lily, the small imperfection at the lower corner. Mamma retained this firm. Papà signed. All that time building a wall around that fact.
Today, looking at what is behind it is not something I can afford.
Alex, The Question
The studio at dusk. The lamp pulled close, the journal open on the worktable. An hour pass the way hours pass when you are not ready to stop working. Because stopping means sitting with the thing you have been circling all day.
I hear him on the stairs before I hear the step. Lorenzo Jr. moves lightly for someone who spends his evenings in workrooms.
He appears in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. This is how he arrives at serious conversations. The casualness of his posture is not carelessness. It is the thing he does when he has already decided to say the difficult thing and wants to give the other person room to receive it.
"You know that lawyer," he says. It is a declaration.
"Yes," I say.
He comes in and takes the chair across the worktable. He does not sit quickly. He sets himself into it the way people settle when they are planning to stay. He looks at the journal. He looks at me.
"Mamma picked his firm on purpose. She researched it for months before Papà signed the contract." A pause. "I saw the files on Mamma's desk the summer before the crash."
He pauses again. "I did not know what they meant until today."
Four years of silence from him, and it turns out the silence was its own kind of waiting. He was carrying a fact without a frame. He is giving me the frame now.
Holding that for a moment. The studio is quiet. Outside the window the coastal evening is going gray blue over the water, the last of the day pulling back.
His eyes move to the sketch pad. "What did Mamma mean by ‘Lorenzo is the key’?"
The note refers to our grandfather, I tell him, “Lorenzo Sr., the Medici legacy, the founding design lineage of the house. The mission I have carried since the third evening after the crash. Since I opened the journal and read her handwriting for the first time since the funeral.”
Lorenzo Jr. looks at the journal. He is quiet in the way he goes quiet when something is landing in a place he has not cleared enough room for yet.
"Maybe," he says.
He does not say what else he thinks it might mean. I do not push him. Lorenzo Jr. comes to things in his own time, and pushing only moves the door further closed.
Alex, The Designs
The back of the journal. The front is all Lorenzo Sr.: formal gown studies in ink, measured and architectural, the draftsmanship of someone who understood structure as the first language of beauty. I go past them.
The back third is in a different hand. I recognize it before I read a single word. Mamma's hand, the slight rightward lean, the precise annotation. The pages are dated within the last two years of Mamma’s life.
The designs are extraordinary. I turn the pages slowly. They are forward, contemporary, nothing like what the house has produced in a decade. Not archival, not tribute.
A collection, I realize, turning the last page. Sequenced, complete, annotated with construction notes.
Mamma was designing in secret and she finished.
Between two pages near the back, tucked flat: a business card. Vittoria Moretti Design. I turn it over. In Mamma’s hand: She asked. I said no.
“What is that?” Lorenzo Jr. says.
The card across the table. He reads it, turns it over, sets it down.
“Vittoria Moretti. She’s been building a name in Florence for years.” He looks at me. “What did she ask for?”
“I don’t know yet,” I say. “But Mamma knew her. And whatever it was, Mamma refused.”
Lorenzo Jr. looks back at the designs. The lamp is between us and his face is entirely readable, which is rare enough that I pay attention.
What I see there has no name at first, and then it does. Hunger. The kind that belongs to someone who has just heard their own language spoken by someone they did not expect.
“These are incredible,” he says. His voice is stripped of the easy deflection he usually keeps on hand. “She finished a whole collection. Did you know Mamma was working?”
“No,” I say. “No one did.”
Alex, The Mission
Having made the statement, I close the journal. I set it on the worktable and look at my brother.
"Here is what I am going to do." He gets the expression he uses for things he did not agree to but can already see coming.
"Find out what Vittoria wanted. Protect these designs. Use what Nonno built to anchor the next collection." I let that sit. "That is what Mamma left us."
Lorenzo looks at me for a beat. "I am not a designer," he says.
"I did not ask you to be."
"You are looking at me like you are about to."
"I am not. Yet."
He picks up his pencil and turns it between his fingers. This is the thing he does when he is deciding whether to push back and how hard. I leave him to it.
You cannot move Lorenzo Jr. by pushing. You leave the door open and you wait, and he comes through when he is ready, and that is the only way it has ever worked between us.
The silence holds for a moment. He is still turning the pencil.
Giulia's voice carries up from the foot of the stairs. I cross the studio to the doorway and listen.
"The cash-flow runway is shorter than the will suggested.
The trust distributions do not activate until the reading is formally processed through Grant and Associates.
Thirty days. After that they will need a bridge loan.
" Giulia delivers this with the brisk efficiency of someone who expects problems to be handled and has already mentally moved to the next one.
Leaning against the doorframe. Down the hall, Giulia is already back on her phone.
I go back to the worktable. Lorenzo Jr. has not moved. The pencil has stopped turning.
Everything in the estate's financial situation now runs through Max's firm. Not at arm's length, not in the managed way I have maintained for four years. Closely. Immediately. With no room for the distance I have needed and used and relied on since the crash.
Hands flat on the worktable. The wood is solid under them. The journal is there. The designs are there. The house is still standing.
One thing at a time.
Alex, His Name
Matteo finishes his homework at the kitchen table at eight, head drooping over his spelling list. I walk him up myself, sit on the edge of his bed with the book we have been working through, and read. He is quiet for the first few pages, as he gets when something is sitting with him.
Then his voice, without looking up from the illustration. "Was that man a friend of yours?"
"Which man?" Voice easy.
"The one with the folder. He looked at me funny."
The page turns. "He's a lawyer. He came to talk about Nonno and Nonna's house."
Matteo considers this with the patience of a child who is too tired to push but not quite tired enough to let go. "Did you know him before?"
A beat. "A long time ago. When I was at university."
"Like school?"
"Like a bigger school."
He nods, satisfied enough, and his eyes close on the next paragraph. His breathing slows and then deepens. I finish the page anyway, keep my voice at the same low register, and then close the book. I pull the door open and stand in the hallway for a moment with my hand on the frame.
The estate files are spread across the desk. I have been working for an hour, building the priority list, when my phone lights up beside the lamp. Grant and Associates letterhead. Maxwell Grant, Senior Partner.
Three sentences. An expedited working session, not seventy-two hours from now but tomorrow at nine o'clock, in light of the cash-flow timeline his office has already received from Giulia.
It is the most professional message I have ever received from someone who stood in this room this morning and watched my son walk in and said nothing. Not one word. Whether that is discipline or a warning, I cannot decide yet, and I am not sure the distinction matters right now.
Tomorrow. 9 a.m. I type it and look at it, then add: My office. Send. Phone face down on the desk.
Reading contracts, managing a room, protecting a family: these I know how to do. What I do not know is how to sit across a desk from Max Grant and pretend nine years did not happen. I have only ever known how to stay away from him, and I have run out of distance.
The house is quiet. Matteo is asleep. Phone in hand. His name on the screen. I put it back down and do not sleep for a long time.