6. Mia
MIA
"This is your office," Sophia said. She pushed the door open and stepped aside like she was presenting a five-star hotel room.
It was not a five-star hotel room. It was better.
I'd spent the last few days settling in. Learning where the mugs were. Memorizing which floorboards creaked. Getting used to the silence of a house that was too big and too beautiful and too empty. But today was the real start. First official day of work.
A solid oak desk sat in front of a floor-to-ceiling glass wall that opened straight onto the valley. Lake, mountains, sky. The kind of view people paid thousands of dollars to see for a weekend. I had it for free, five days a week, with a mini-fridge.
"There's a couch if you need to think," Sophia said. "And a laptop. Brand new."
I ran my fingers along the edge of the desk. Smooth. Heavy. Real wood. Two thick leather journals sat next to the laptop, their spines cracked and softened with age.
"Those are for you to start with," Sophia said. "There are more in the study."
The cover of the nearest one was warm under my fingers. Worn soft from years of being held.
"Ready?" Sophia asked.
I nodded. I was more than ready.
She led me down a corridor I hadn't seen before. Past a bathroom with marble tile. Past a storage closet. Past a door that was closed and locked. Then she stopped in front of a room at the end of the hall and opened it without ceremony.
I stepped inside and my brain went quiet.
Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Every wall. Dark wood, polished, stuffed with volumes in Italian and English and what might have been Latin. A leather chair in the corner with a reading lamp beside it. The lamp was on. It had the feel of a light that never got turned off.
Three shelves to the right of the chair held nothing but journals. Dozens of them. Identical brown leather, each one labeled with a year in small, precise handwriting on the spine.
"This is Ludo's study," Sophia said. Her voice dropped low. "Tony built it from memory. Every shelf, every book. He spent months getting the placement right."
I stood in the doorway and stared.
Heaven.
"Take your time in here," Sophia said. "I'll have lunch ready at noon."
She left. I didn't move for a long time.
The first journal came off the shelf with a quiet tug. I sat down in the chair and it creaked under me. I put on my reading glasses and opened the cover.
Ludo's handwriting was tiny. Beautiful. The kind of penmanship they don't teach anymore. Each letter precise, each line straight, the ink faded to a warm brown.
The reading started slow.
He wrote about his garden first. A new species of lavender he'd planted along the south wall of the house. How the bees loved it. How the deer ate everything else but left the lavender alone. He'd made a note in the margin: Deer are smarter than we give them credit for.
That earned a smile.
Then he wrote about his son.
Tony drew me a picture today. A house with windows that go all the way to the sky.
He is seven years old and already sees the world in ways I cannot explain.
His quiet genius even at such a young age is astonishing to me.
I told him it was wonderful. He looked at me like I was lying.
He already knows the difference between praise and truth.
This child will break my heart with how much he sees.
My throat tightened. Not sadness. Not grief. Just the weight of a father's love written down in ink and kept on a shelf for decades.
The entries kept coming.
Ludo wrote about Tony learning to paint.
About Tony's first canvas at nine, already better than anything in Ludo's own collection.
About Tony at eleven, standing in a field and staring at the light for an hour before he picked up a brush.
Ludo described his son the way astronomers describe stars.
With awe. With the understanding that he was witnessing something rare.
I read for two hours. I forgot about the office. I forgot about the view. I forgot about everything except a dead man's voice and the boy he loved more than anything.
But something was missing.
Ludo wrote about his garden. His neighbors. His work. His research trips to Rome and Florence. He wrote about the weather, the light, the sound of rain on the roof.
He never wrote about his wife.
Not once. Not a single mention. Not her name, not her opinions, not what she ate for dinner. There was no "Angelina thinks" or "my wife said." There was nothing. Just a wife-shaped hole in every entry.
That wasn't an oversight. That was a story.
My journalist brain caught fire.
I closed the journal and pressed my palms flat on the desk. Took a breath.
Not your story, Mia. You're a transcriber. Type the words. Don't investigate them.
I opened the journal again. Kept reading. But the absence sat in my chest like a stone.
Sophia had soup waiting in the kitchen. Something thick and golden with chunks of potato and what smelled like cumin. She slid a bowl across the counter and waited until I picked up my spoon.
I ate. The soup was incredible.
"How are the journals?" she asked. She sat across from me at the counter, her own bowl untouched.
"Amazing," I said. "His writing is beautiful. The way he talks about Tony..."
Sophia nodded. A shadow crossed her face. Old. Heavy.
"Ludo was a wonderful man," she said. "The best man I've ever known, next to my husband."
I took another spoonful. Waited.
Sophia set her spoon on the counter. Lined it up next to her bowl. Fussing. Stalling.
"His stepmother," she said. The word came out flat. Stripped of everything. "Tony's stepmother. She... there were bruises, Mia. Years of them. He was just a boy."
The soup turned cold in my mouth.
"I shouldn't be telling you this," Sophia said. She straightened her back. Folded her hands on the counter. "But you look at him like you see him. Most people don't bother."
I didn't know what to say to that. I hadn't even met him. All I had was a silhouette in a window and a pull in my chest I couldn't name.
"Thank you for telling me," I said.
Sophia picked up her spoon and started eating. The conversation was over. I knew better than to push.
But my brain was already running. Bruises. A stepmother. Years of silence. A conspicuous absence in a dead man's journals.
I finished my soup. Washed both bowls. Sophia let me, which was how I knew she was tired.
Back in my office, I opened the laptop. My hands hovered over the keyboard.
Don't do this, Mia. This isn't your story.
I typed "Ludovico Rossi" into the search bar.
Results loaded. Articles about his art collection. A museum in Florence that bore his name. A Wikipedia page with a photograph. Handsome. Silver-haired. Kind eyes. A face that made you trust someone before they'd said a word.
I scrolled.
More photos. Ludo at a gallery opening. Ludo at a charity event. Ludo with his arm around a young boy with wild dark curls and green eyes that already looked like they were cataloging the room.
And then a photo from a society page. Ludo at a gala. Standing beside a woman who was much younger. Dark hair. Cat-like smile. Polished to the point of performance. Her hand on his arm like she owned him.
I recognized her.
My whole body went still.
No fucking way.
I leaned closer to the screen. Zoomed in. Stared at the face I'd seen on my own monitor at the station, on my own teleprompter, in my own research files.
Angelina Marshall.
"Our Lady of Perpetual Victimhood." That's what I'd called her.
On national television. During a segment I'd spent three weeks researching.
An illness she'd faked for sympathy donations.
A pyramid scheme she'd been connected to through a shell company.
I'd called her out on all of it. Friendly smile, iron delivery, every fact backed up.
She'd tried to have me fired. Called the station owner. Threatened legal action. Jack had laughed her off the phone.
And she was Tony Rossi's stepmother.
She was the one who'd left bruises on a boy.
I sat back in my chair. The leather creaked. The sound was too loud in the quiet office.
Everything Sophia had said. The bruises. The years. The way Ludo never mentioned her name. The way Tony hid in a glass house and wouldn't come out.
It all made horrible, perfect, devastating sense.
My blood went cold. Not the cold of fear. The cold of recognition. The cold of knowing who someone is and what they're capable of.
And somewhere in the back of my brain, a second thought arrived. Quieter. Worse.
If Angelina ever came here, she would recognize me. She'd seen my face on her screen the same way I'd seen hers on mine. Hadley Winslow had humiliated her in front of millions of viewers.
Mia Hayes meant nothing to Angelina Marshall. But Hadley Winslow? Hadley Winslow she would never forget.
I closed the laptop. Gripped the edge of the desk with both hands.
You're fine. She's not here. She's not coming.
The laptop opened again. Back to the journals. Three lines of transcription before my fingers stopped.
Ludo's handwriting stared back at me. All that love in every sentence. All that absence where Angelina should have been.
Had Ludo known? You don't erase someone from your private journals unless they've given you a reason. But knowing and doing nothing were two different sins.
Did you know, Ludo? Did you know what she was doing to your son?
The answer wasn't in these pages. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
I put my reading glasses on the desk and rubbed the bridge of my nose.
The light was fading when I packed up. Gold to amber to gray. The edges of the valley had gone soft outside my office window.
I walked through the kitchen heading for the door. Sophia had gone home already. Her light was on above the stove, same as always.
I stopped.
A prickle at the back of my neck. That instinct you get when someone is watching and you can't explain how you know.
I turned and looked through the glass wall, across the courtyard, toward the far wing.
A silhouette behind the window. Still. Tall. Standing in the dark.
My heart did a thing it had no right doing. Fast and hard and uncalled for.
I raised my hand. A small wave. Just a hello. Just an acknowledgment that I saw him.
The figure didn't move.
I held my hand up for another second. Then I dropped it. Picked up my bag. Walked to the door.
My pulse was doing things it had no business doing. I wasn't scared. I'd been scared before and this wasn't it. This was different. Warmer. Older. A feeling I hadn't let in for a long time and wasn't ready to name.
I got in my SUV and drove down the mountain.
The diner was warm and loud. Cleo brought me a burger without asking what I wanted. She had that energy. Tall, dark-skinned, cool without trying. She should have been running a gallery in SoHo, not pouring coffee in a mountain town.
"From New York?" I'd asked her the first time.
"Brooklyn," she'd said. Nothing else. I didn't push. We all had our reasons for being here.
I ate half the burger. Put my fork down. Picked it up. Put it down again.
I'd been thinking about Tony Rossi all day.
Not the job. Not the journals. Not the ticking bomb of Angelina Marshall. Not the dead man's beautiful handwriting. Not the fact that my cover could shatter if the wrong woman walked through the wrong door.
Him.
The man I'd never met. The man who built a glass house on a mountain and filled it with his dead father's things. The man who watched me from a dark room and didn't move when I waved.
The man whose genius his father had seen at seven. Whose bruises Sophia had counted in silence for years.
I pushed my plate away.
This is dangerous.
And I didn't mean the stalker.