Pipe Burst Guest novel · Chapter 21 of 24
Chapter 21: The Lobby
Marisa's POV
The lobby of the Arden had marble floors and a staircase my father had built for a woman he never married.
At that hour on a Sunday it was full.
The desk clerks stood in a row, the bellmen had stopped at the door, and the kitchen staff had come up the back stairs in their aprons to see what the noise was.
The captains stood along one wall.
Nico walked half a step behind me, and I did not ask him to.
Ines sat in a gold chair by the front desk with her cream coat folded over her knees.
Her hair was in place.
Her face was white, and she looked up at me as I came across the marble.
"Sweetheart," she said.
"Don't."
"I thought you'd come."
"I didn't have anywhere else to be."
She nodded.
"Tell me," she said. "I want you to say it, in front of everyone. Did he do it?"
"Who?"
"Your father."
I stopped three feet from her chair.
The whole lobby had gone quiet enough for me to hear the revolving door settling.
"No," I said. "He did not."
Her hands went still on the coat.
"The order was Tullio's forgery. Your father found out Tullio was stealing, and Tullio killed him for it. He wrote a paper in my father's name, and he sold it to Cesare, and Cesare sold it to you."
"He said he was sorry." Her voice was barely there. "At nineteen. I stood in his study and asked him, and he said he was sorry."
"He was sorry because he'd called your father a thief in front of Tullio, in anger, over a story," I said. "He did not know the story was a lie until it was too late to say."
"He kept me."
"He told me to go to you at the funeral. He sat in that study for a year looking at your father's face."
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