Chapter 3: The Room Upstairs
The mansion had gone quiet, but it didn’t feel peaceful.
After the guests left, the dining room seemed too large for the few of us who remained. Staff cleared plates in careful silence. Vanessa stood near the windows, arms folded, while Michael lingered at the end of the table. Luca had not raised his voice since the dinner began. Somehow, that made the strain in his face harder to ignore.
Teresa looked tired. Her fingers rested on the edge of the table, trembling against the polished wood.
“You don’t have to look for anything tonight,” Luca told her. “We can wait until morning.”
“If I wait, I might forget again.” She drew a slow breath. “I want to see his room.”
Luca paused, careful not to turn her request into an order.
“Are you sure?”
“No. But I want to try.”
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
Teresa reached for my hand. “Please.”
Luca glanced toward Michael.
“You stay here.”
Michael gave a brief, humorless smile. “You think I’m going to follow you upstairs?”
“I think Mom deserves one room where she doesn’t have to watch you argue with me.”
For a moment, Michael looked ready to answer. Then his gaze shifted to Teresa, and he said nothing.
Vanessa stepped away from the windows. “This is all becoming a spectacle.”
“It’s over for tonight,” Luca said. “Go home if you want.”
She stared at him, as if she expected him to soften the words. When he didn’t, she picked up her coat from the back of a chair.
“I’m not the one making your mother relive a painful night.”
Teresa’s grip tightened around my hand.
Luca noticed. “No one is going to let you leave this room without your say,” Luca said.
Vanessa’s expression tightened. She glanced at Teresa, then at me, as if one of us had spoiled the evening on purpose.
“Fine,” she said. “Call me when you’re ready to have a reasonable conversation.”
She walked out without waiting for an answer. The front door closed a moment later.
Luca watched Teresa’s hand until her fingers loosened around mine.
“Do you still want to go upstairs?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll go slowly.”
He offered her his arm, but Teresa looked at me first. When she reached for my hand instead, he didn’t take it personally. He simply walked beside us as we left the dining room.
At the foot of the staircase, Teresa stopped.
“His room was at the end of the hall,” she said. “The door with the brass handle.”
“I remember,” Luca replied.
He didn’t ask how long it had been since she’d gone in. None of us needed to hear the answer.
We climbed one step at a time. Teresa leaned on the banister, pausing whenever her breath grew short. I stayed close enough to steady her, but I didn’t pull her forward. When we reached the upper hall, Luca opened the door and waited for her to decide whether to enter.
The room beyond was neat and dim, lit by a single lamp near the bed. Giovanni’s dark wood desk stood against the wall opposite the windows. A chair was tucked beneath it. There were framed photographs on the shelves, their silver edges dulled by time, and a folded reading blanket at the foot of the bed.
Teresa stopped in the doorway.
“I thought they had changed everything,” she murmured.
“Nothing in here was moved,” Luca said. “Not after Dad died.”
She looked at the desk.
“That’s where he kept the papers he didn’t want the office staff to see.”
“Do you remember what was in them?” I asked.
Teresa shook her head. “Not exactly. He used to say household things went in the study. These were different.”
She crossed the room with careful steps. At the desk, she rested one hand on its edge, her gaze moving over the bare surface.
“After the funeral, I came in here,” she said. “The drawers were open. Everything had been cleared out.”
Luca’s jaw tightened. “Who cleared them?”
“I don’t know. I asked, but people kept telling me not to worry about it.” Her eyes narrowed as she searched for the memory. “They said the family papers had been taken care of.”
He looked toward the open drawers. They were empty except for a little dust.
“Did you see anyone take them?”
“I can’t remember.” Teresa pressed her fingers to her temple, frustrated. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” Luca said. “We’re not asking you to make the past come back on command.”
His voice was gentle, but his eyes stayed on the desk. I understood why. A piece of furniture was something he could inspect. A missing memory wasn’t.
I looked at the floor near the desk’s right side. A narrow pale mark crossed the wood beneath it, then disappeared behind the desk leg. It might have been a scratch from a chair or a cleaning tool. But the desk’s other edges showed no similar marks.
“Mr. Moretti,” I said. “Could you look at this?”
Luca came over. I pointed without touching it.
He crouched, studying the line.
“Did you notice this before?” he asked Teresa.
She leaned toward it, then shook her head.
“I don’t know.”
Luca didn’t ask her to guess. He stood and examined the desk from the side.
“Help me pull it away from the wall,” he said to me.
Teresa lifted a hand. “Careful. Giovanni hated when it scraped.”
“We’ll be careful,” Luca promised.
We moved the desk only a few inches. Its feet dragged softly across the floor, revealing a clean strip of wood where it had rested. Behind it, near the lower corner, a small rectangular panel sat almost flush against the wall. A faint line of dust marked its edges, except for one brighter streak near the bottom.
Luca glanced at his mother.
“Does this look familiar?”
Teresa studied the panel. Her lips parted, but no words came. Then her eyes shifted to the desk.
“He used to sit here and write,” she said. “Sometimes he’d stop when someone came in and cover whatever he was working on.”
Luca crouched near the panel but didn’t touch it.
“Did you know there was something behind the wall?”
“No.” Teresa’s voice was faint. “Not until now.”
He took a small tool from the desk drawer, then paused.
“Mom, do you want to stay in the room while I open it?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Luca.”
He eased the tool into the narrow seam. The panel resisted, then shifted with a quiet click. Behind it was a shallow compartment, dark and nearly empty.
Teresa caught her breath.
Luca angled the lamp toward the opening. A pale dust line traced the bottom. Most of the space was bare, but one corner was smudged, and a thin groove ran along the inside edge, as if something had been pulled out in a hurry. The brighter streak on the panel looked like a mark left by a hand or tool, not a natural discoloration.
“I never saw this,” Luca said.
Teresa’s eyes stayed fixed on the hollow space.
“Your father kept something there,” she whispered.
Luca looked at her. “You remember?”
“I remember him saying he had put the papers somewhere safe.” She swallowed. “Maybe this was what he meant.”
A small sound came from the doorway. Michael stood in the hall, one hand resting against the frame. He hadn’t come into the room.
“I thought you said to stay downstairs,” Luca said.
“I did.” Michael’s eyes moved from the desk to the open panel. “I heard the furniture.”
“Then you heard correctly.”
Michael took one step closer, then stopped when Teresa shifted behind me.
“I’m not here to upset her,” he said.
“You already did that at dinner,” Luca replied.
Michael’s face hardened. “I said I wasn’t here to argue.”
“Then go back downstairs.”
For a moment, no one moved. Teresa looked at Michael, but she didn’t speak. He glanced at the empty compartment and then at the floor beside it. The brief change in his expression was gone almost as soon as I saw it.
Luca saw it too.
“What?” Luca asked.
“Nothing.”
“Then you won’t mind if we look.”
Michael’s mouth tightened. He stepped back into the hall.
“Do what you want.”
He turned away. His footsteps retreated down the corridor, steady and unhurried.
Luca kept his eyes on the doorway until the sound faded. Then he returned to the panel.
“I don’t want to pull anything loose without seeing where it’s caught,” he said. “Hannah, can you hold the lamp?”
I did. Its light fell across the compartment and the narrow gap behind the panel. Luca leaned closer, careful not to scrape the edges. Teresa watched from beside the desk, her face pale with fatigue, one hand wrapped around the other.
“There’s something caught back there,” he said.
He reached in only far enough to touch the edge of it. The object shifted, but did not come free.
Luca stopped.
“What is it?” Teresa asked.
“I can’t tell yet.”
He angled the light again. Something thin and gray-white was wedged behind the panel, its edge torn and darkened with age.
May you like
Luca gently freed one corner.
A torn ledger page remained lodged behind the panel.
