Chapter 3
We searched the room ourselves.
No staff.
No relatives.
Only Rafe, Adrian, me, and two guards.
The red case turned up beneath the fallen studio fabric.
Empty.
The memory card was gone.
I looked at Gavin.
He shrugged.
“Maybe the kid dropped it.”
Wrong phrase.
I stepped closer.
“My daughter.”
He looked away.
Good.
Then Adrian said:
“I may have photographed who picked it up.”
Of course he did.
That camera had become everyone’s worst enemy.
He scrolled through the burst shots taken when the backdrop collapsed.
Frames.
Fabric.
Gavin falling.
Lorraine lunging.
Then one corner of an image caught my eye.
A black shoe.
A hand.
My mother’s.
She was already on the floor after I slapped her.
And her left hand was reaching beneath the cart.
The next image showed her fist closed.
I turned toward Lorraine.
“Open your handbag.”
She did not move.
Rafe took it.
Inside:
Lipstick.
Phone.
Wallet.
Pearls.
A folded program.
No memory card.
Then Adrian looked toward the overturned photo albums.
“Wait.”
He lifted one.
A tiny black memory card slid from beneath the cover.
Not red.
The red plastic had only been the protective case.
Lorraine lunged.
Again.
Rafe caught her before she reached me.
I stared.
My sixty-six-year-old mother was willing to fight bodyguards over something smaller than a fingernail.
Interesting.
I inserted the card into Adrian’s camera.
One folder.
No name.
Fifty-seven photographs.
The first was old.
My father.
Twenty years younger.
Standing inside the same portrait hall.
Beside him were Lorraine, Gavin’s father, and six senior Valenti men.
All wearing black mourning bands.
Except nobody had died that week.
I remembered.
I was twenty-one.
My father told me they were attending a memorial dinner.
There had been no memorial.
The second photograph showed a table.
Seven black rings arranged around a single silver key.
The third showed my mother placing her hand over the key.
I looked at Lorraine.
“What did Father photograph?”
Her face changed.
“He shouldn’t have kept those.”
That was not an answer.
Then I reached photograph twelve.
A teenage Gavin.
And behind him—
May you like
my older brother Matteo.
The brother I had been told disappeared after betraying our father.
