Chapter 2 - The Kitchen Floor
Downstairs, far from the polished mahogany and leather books of the third-floor study, the kitchen smelled of vinegar, bleach, and warm bread.
Elena Silva knelt by the baseboard near the pantry, scrubbing a grease spot with a small brush dipped in soapy water. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, secured with a broken chopstick. A smudge of gray ash ran across her left cheekbone from the wood-fired oven where she had baked three loaves of peasant bread for the evening staff meal.
At thirty-two, Elena moved with the quiet, economical grace of someone who had spent her entire life trying not to take up too much space.
Ten feet away, sitting cross-legged on the linoleum floor with a plastic measuring cup and three wooden spoons, was her daughter, Maya.
Maya was three and a half.
She had her mother’s dark, wide-set eyes and a mop of curly brown hair that defied every attempt at containment. At the moment, she was deeply engrossed in a complex engineering project involving blue plastic bowls, a sponge, and a small rubber duck.
“Maya,” Elena whispered without stopping her scrubbing. “Keep your voice quiet. The master is upstairs.”
Maya didn’t look up. “Is he sleeping?”
“He’s working.”
“What does he work on?”
“Numbers,” Elena said, rinsing the rag in a galvanized bucket. “And papers.”
“Why doesn’t he walk?”
Elena paused. Her hand stayed frozen inside the gray water.
She had worked at the Moretti estate for eight months, hired after the previous cook retired to Naples. In all that time, she had seen Dominic Moretti precisely three times—twice walking across the gravel courtyard in a tailored charcoal suit that seemed too heavy for his broad shoulders, and once standing in the doorway of the conservatory, looking out over the rose garden with a glass of scotch in his hand.
He had looked like a monument carved out of winter stone.
Then came the garage.
Then the wheelchair.
And now the entire house whispered around him like children tiptoeing past a sleeping bear that had forgotten how to hunt.
“He had an accident, chiquita,” Elena said softly, smoothing a strand of hair behind Maya’s ear. “His legs got tired. Very tired.”
“Can I give him my duck?” Maya asked, holding up the yellow rubber toy by its neck.
“No,” Elena said quickly, a faint smile touching her lips. “Mr. Moretti doesn’t want a rubber duck, Maya. He wants everyone to leave him alone.”
“Everybody?”
“Almost everybody.”
Just then, the heavy swinging door from the main hall pushed open with a soft squeak.
Chef Vincenzo entered, wiping his hands on a white apron that had seen better decades. His face was flushed from the heat of the stoves, and his brow was furrowed in deep annoyance.
“Elena,” Vincenzo muttered in rapid Italian-accented English. “The risotto came back down. Half-eaten. He didn't even touch the cheese.”
Elena stood up, wiping her hands on her apron. “Maybe he’s not hungry, Chef.”
“Hungry?” Vincenzo snorted, tossing a dish towel onto the stainless steel counter. “A man doesn’t lose his appetite because of a bad back. He loses his appetite because he thinks his life is over. I tell you, Signor Dominic was a lion. Now he sits in that dark room like a ghost waiting for his own funeral.”
“It’s a terrible thing,” Elena murmured, looking toward the dark stairway that led to the upper floors.
“Terrible? It’s dangerous,” Vincenzo corrected, lowering his voice. “You think Ricardo is going to run this family forever? Ricardo has too many friends in Chicago who want those shipping lanes. If Dominic stays up there staring at the walls much longer, there won’t be anything left of the Moretti name by spring.”
Elena didn’t answer. She knew nothing about shipping lanes, Chicago syndicates, or mafia politics. She knew how to bake bread, how to keep grease off linoleum, and how to raise a three-year-old on a cook’s assistant salary while saving every spare euro for her sister’s medical school tuition in Bogotá.
The less she knew about the Moretti family business, the longer she would keep her job.
Yet, as she looked down at the silver tray resting on the counter—with its untouched bowl of mushroom risotto growing cold beneath the metal dome—a strange, persistent tug of unease settled in her chest.
She remembered what it felt like to be broken.
Two years after her husband died in a construction accident in Queens, she had spent three months sitting in a narrow apartment with the curtains drawn, staring at a patch of sunlight on the floor, convinced that tomorrow had nothing left to offer.
If someone had brought her a bowl of cold risotto then, she probably would have thrown it at them.
“Elena?”
She looked down.
May you like
Maya was holding the yellow rubber duck out toward the doorway, her small face completely serious.
“He needs it,” Maya said with the absolute certainty of a child. “It has a squeaker.”
