THE SEWING BOX
“Throw it away.”
Vanessa Bellini didn’t even slow down as she passed me in the upstairs hallway of Luca Moretti’s Chicago mansion. I looked at the small wooden box in my hands — dark walnut, brass hinges, one corner repaired with a strip of faded blue cloth, three tiny initials carved into the lid: L.M.M.
“Are you sure, ma’am?”
“Did I stutter? Then put it in the trash before Luca sees it.”
“Whose is it?”
“His mother’s.”
I stopped moving. Everyone in that house knew the one subject Luca Moretti never discussed: his mother. Lucia Moretti had died when Luca was sixteen, twenty-two years earlier. No portraits downstairs, no jewelry displayed, nothing — yet every year on October seventeenth, Luca vanished before sunrise and returned alone after dark.
“Maybe Mr. Moretti would want—” “He doesn’t.” Vanessa stepped closer. “Tonight is our engagement dinner, Emma. Forty investors, politicians, family friends, and people who actually matter will be downstairs. I don’t want some dusty little relic from a dead woman lying around.”
My name is Emma Sullivan. I was twenty-eight, working housekeeping at Luca’s Gold Coast mansion for nine months. I needed that job — my father’s heating had failed the previous winter, my younger sister Chloe still owed thousands in community-college tuition. So I lowered my eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”