Chapter 10 - My Mother's Secret
I laughed because the alternative was breaking something.
“My mother cleaned hotel rooms.”
Victor shook his head. “That was after.”
“After what?”
“She kept books for one of Sofia’s charities. Quietly. Off the record.”
Ricardo stared at him. “You knew Clara’s mother?”
“I met her twice.”
I felt sick.
My mother had always said her old office job ended badly. She never gave details. After my father left, she worked anything she could get.
Victor continued. “Evelyn found payments she couldn’t explain. Sofia believed they were tied to someone moving money through relief foundations.”
“Marco?” Ricardo asked.
“Maybe.”
I snapped, “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
“Your mother made Sofia promise to keep you out of it.”
I walked away before I said something I couldn’t take back.
In the guest room, I opened the old voicemail archive on my phone. I had saved every message from my mother because grief makes you hoard strange things.
One voicemail was from two weeks before she died.
“Clara, if anyone ever asks about the Moretti Foundation, you don’t know anything. Promise me.”
I had thought she sounded tired.
Now she sounded scared.
There was a knock.
Ricardo stood outside.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what? Your family lying to mine? Mine lying to me?”
“For all of it.”
I almost shut the door.
Then my phone rang.
Unknown number.
I answered.
A woman whispered, “Your mother didn’t die from an aneurysm.”
May you like
For years I had remembered my mother as tired hands, grocery lists, and cheap perfume she wore on Sundays. Suddenly strangers were handing me a second version of her: careful, brave, frightened, involved in something powerful men wanted hidden. I resented all of them for knowing pieces of her I never got to ask about. I resented her too, which made the grief worse.
The line went dead.
