The Daughter They Erased Came Back Untouchable novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Room Off the Kitchen

Her father welcomes her from the top of the marble stairs and sends her to the cook's helper's room; Nerina takes her old room instead and finds a trust deed waiting that would hand him her vote.

The villa's front door opened before the car had stopped.

A line of staff stood in the hall in pressed uniforms, and not one of them met my eyes.

Beyond them rose the marble staircase.

It had twenty-two steps, and a skylight poured white afternoon light down the middle of them.

I had counted those steps every night for a week after I left, lying on a school cot in the dark.

At the top of the stairs stood my father.

Baldassare Falconieri wore a charcoal suit and a calm face, and he held one hand lightly on the banister.

"Nerina," he said. "Welcome home."

He did not come down.

He did not offer to take my bag, or touch my shoulder, or say my name the way a father says it.

"Thank you, Papa," I said.

I had practiced that on the plane, so my voice would not shake, and it didn't.

Ugo stood beside me with his chin up.

Gaetano carried my bag in silence, and Fiammetta stopped at the foot of the stairs and put her hand on the newel post.

She would not climb.

I noticed, and I noticed my father notice me noticing.

"Signora," he said to the housekeeper, a woman I had never seen. "Put the girl in the room off the kitchen."

The housekeeper's eyes went wide.

"The girl, signor?"

"The small one by the pantry. She'll be comfortable there."

Behind me someone gasped, and I did not turn to see who.

The room off the kitchen was where the cook's helper slept.

I understood the message exactly.

I was not a daughter here, and every servant in the hall had just heard it.

I set my coat on the bench by the door.

Then I started up the stairs.

I climbed slowly, with my hand on the cold rail.

On the fourteenth step I stopped, because a mark in the marble caught the skylight.

It was a hairline crack, no longer than my thumb, and I knew it.

I had seen it for the last time the day of the fall.

My father watched me look at it.

His expression did not change at all.

"I'll take my old room," I said, when I reached the top.

"That is Fiammetta's study now."

"Then she can say so."

Every head in the hall turned toward my sister.

Fiammetta looked at the floor, at her shoes, at the banister, at everything except me.

"I don't use it," she said finally.

"Fiammetta," said Papa.

It was only her name, said gently.

She closed her mouth.

I watched her do it, and I thought, she has been closing it for four years.

"Of course," my father said, and he smiled. "It is her house too."

He said it for the staff.

Every one of them would repeat it to the others by dinner, and every one of them would also remember the room off the kitchen.

Ugo cleared his throat.

"Papa, the girl should rest. We've been traveling all day."

"The girl is a Falconieri again," my father said. "Is that not what we told her?"

"It's what you told me," I said.

His eyes rested on mine for one second longer than was polite.

Then he turned and walked down the upstairs corridor, and the staff hurried back to their work.

My old room had its own door at the end of the hall.

I opened it.

The bed was gone, and so was the shelf of ship models Nonna had given me.

A black piano stood where my bed had been, and a music stand, and a pile of sheet music nobody had touched.

The desk was where it had always been, under the window.

On the desk lay a leather folder and a fountain pen.

A card rested on the folder in my father's square handwriting.

Read this and sign by Friday.

I opened the folder.

The cover page said Family Trust Deed, and below it, in clean black type, the heading of the first clause.

The undersigned, Nerina Falconieri, assigns the exercise of every voting right she holds in Falconieri Maritime to her father, Baldassare Falconieri, as trustee, until she reaches the age of twenty-five.

I read it twice.

Then I turned to the last page.

A line was ready for my name, and next to it, in small letters, a second line.

On signing, the undersigned's surname is restored in the family register.

I stood very still.

They had stripped my name from me.

Now they were offering it back, if I handed over everything else.

A soft knock came at the door.

Fiammetta stood in the corridor, holding a glass of water in both hands.

She looked at the folder on the desk, and her face went white.

"Did he," she said, and stopped.

"Did he what?"

"Nothing."

She set the glass on the piano without meeting my eyes.

The medal swung on its chain as she bent, and I saw her fingers close over it again.

"Don't sign it tonight," she said, very low. "Please. Wait until you've eaten."

"Why tonight?"

She was already walking away.

I looked down at the pen.

It was heavy, black and gold, and my father's initials were on the clip.

He had not even had to say he was expecting me to use it.

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