Chapter 3 - WHAT SOFIA HEARD
By the following afternoon, I had learned two things about a hospital bed. It made every minute seem longer than the last, and it gave people who loved you far too much time to worry.
Lily had spent the morning arranging an appointment with campus security. Detective Brooks had assigned another officer to collect Nadia Ruiz's invoice and statement. Margaret Collins called twice, first to ask whether I was eating, and then to complain that the hospital soup looked like something she would refuse to serve to a stray dog.
“I'm bringing real soup tomorrow,” she promised.
“Margaret, I'm fine.”
“You are stitched from wrist to waist. That is not my definition of fine.”
When she hung up, I smiled for the first time since the engagement dinner.
Then Matteo called.
“I need to ask a favor,” he said. “And you can say no.”
That alone made me suspicious. Men like Matteo Romano were not accustomed to being refused. “What favor?”
“Sofia wants to speak with you. She asked three times this morning.”
I closed my eyes. “Is she all right?”
“Physically, yes. Emotionally, I'm not sure. We met with her pediatrician, Dr. Alma Finch. We're making sure she has support that isn't tied to what the adults in this house want.”
“Then I'd love to talk to her.”
Matteo hesitated. “She keeps asking whether she did something wrong by remembering what Bianca said.”
My heart tightened. “Tell her she didn't.”
“I have. She wants to hear it from you.”
They arrived an hour later with Dr. Finch's approval for a short visit. Sofia wore jeans, purple sneakers, and a sweatshirt printed with tiny planets. She carried a sketchbook covered in stickers. Matteo walked beside her, looking as though he had been awake for a century.
Sofia stopped near the foot of my bed. Her gaze moved across the bandages.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Some.”
“I'm sorry.”
“You didn't hurt me, sweetheart.”
She looked at her father. “Can I sit?”
Matteo pulled a chair close enough that she could reach my blanket without touching the wounds. She opened her sketchbook. On the first page she had drawn a crooked roast chicken with a bright-red warning sign above it. Next to the chicken was a little person with a knife and the words EMILY SAID STOP.
“I made it so I won't forget,” she explained.
“You're a very good artist.”
“I'm better at drawing cats.”
“I'm sure you are.”
She turned to the next page. There was a dining table, a woman in green, and a red bag. Sofia had written three sentences beside the picture. Matteo watched without interrupting.
“Bianca told Miles not to give the bag back until the pictures were taken,” she said. “I heard them in the hall. Then I asked why she had my medicine, and she said grown-up people had important plans.”
“You remember the words?” I asked gently.
Sofia nodded. “She said, 'One bite, then the cameras.' I thought she meant we were doing a surprise picture. I didn't know the food was bad.”
I glanced toward Matteo. He had gone rigid, but he kept his voice soft.
“You did nothing wrong,” he told her. “And you don't have to tell this story again today unless you want to.”
Sofia studied the drawing. “I want people to know. But I don't want everyone staring at me.”
“We can ask them to listen somewhere quiet,” he said. “And I'll be there if you want.”
“I want Emily there too, when she's better.”
The innocence of that request nearly broke me. I had spent the previous evening wondering whether my hands would ever stop shaking. Sofia wanted me to sit beside her, as though courage were something adults could simply lend children by staying close.
“I can do that,” I told her. “If you still want me there when the time comes.”
Matteo's phone buzzed. He stepped into the hallway, leaving the door partly open. Sofia and I watched a sparrow settle on the narrow concrete ledge outside the window.
“Dad is sad,” she said.
“He's scared.”
“I don't want him to be scared.”
“He loves you. That's part of it.”
She thought about that. “Mom used to say loving people means letting them be themselves.”
I smiled sadly. Elena Romano had died of cancer three years earlier, before I began working at the mansion. I knew her mostly through photographs: a woman with dark curls, warm eyes, and an expression that suggested she could laugh at anyone who took himself too seriously.
“Sofia, what do you remember about your mom?”
“She made a place for kids whose parents couldn't pay for special doctors. I went there once. It had a giant painting of a whale.”
“The foundation?”
She nodded. “Harbor House. It has a music room too.”
I had heard the name, but I didn't know the building was tied to Sofia. Matteo had donated generously to clinics throughout Chicago, yet the Elena Romano Children's Foundation had never been discussed at staff meetings. Its finances were managed outside the household.
“Bianca said she was going to make Harbor House pretty,” Sofia continued. “She said the whale was childish and that the waterfront would be better with a hotel.”
I sat very still.
“Did she tell your dad?”
“No. She told Uncle Dario. He came to the study with papers. I was hiding under the desk because I'd spilled juice and thought I'd get in trouble.” She grimaced. “I know I'm not supposed to hide.”
“You're allowed to tell the truth about it now.”
“She said, 'Once Sofia is at Silver Birch, the trustees can authorize the transfer.' Uncle Dario said Dad would never agree unless something terrible happened.”
I felt the room go cold around us. I didn't ask her to repeat it. I asked whether she wanted to draw anything else, and she began sketching a cat with two enormous ears.
When Matteo came back, I took care not to make Sofia feel as if she had become evidence instead of a child. We talked about cats, the hospital's terrible pudding, and whether Margaret's cinnamon rolls counted as breakfast. Only when Sofia asked to visit the gift shop with her father's driver did I quietly tell Matteo what she had remembered.
“Dario?” he said. “My cousin?”
“She says Bianca talked to him about Harbor House.”
Matteo sank into the chair. For a man whose presence usually filled entire rooms, he suddenly seemed diminished by the simple weight of trust turning uncertain.
“Dario sits on Elena's foundation board,” he said. “I made him a trustee when Elena was ill. I was busy running the business and thought family would protect what she built.”
“Did he?”
“Until yesterday, I believed so.”
He explained the building's significance. Harbor House wasn't merely valuable waterfront real estate. It offered outpatient specialty care, family counseling, and emergency housing for parents whose children needed hospital treatment far from home. Elena had spent her final healthy months raising money for it.
“Bianca hates the place,” I said. “She complains when your car stops there.”
“She told me the building was financially unsustainable. Dario supported her.”
“Maybe they wanted you to believe that.”
He looked at the door his daughter had just passed through. “I owe her better than this.”
I wanted to tell him he did. I also wanted to tell him that saying so in a hospital was easier than changing the structure of a family empire. Instead, I said, “Then start by listening to her.”
“I intend to.”
Later that afternoon, Detective Brooks arrived with a child-interview specialist. She did not question Sofia at my bedside. Instead she described the plan to Matteo and asked what arrangements would make his daughter comfortable. He insisted that Sofia's wishes be respected; he did not insist on controlling her account.
After the detective left, a lawyer named Evelyn Park came to see me. She was not Matteo's attorney. She said she represented injured workers and had been contacted by Lily after the hospital social worker offered referrals.
“You do not have to depend on Mr. Romano's lawyers,” Evelyn told me. “You have claims that exist regardless of who he is, and your cooperation with investigators shouldn't cost you your livelihood.”
I nearly cried from relief. Bianca had spent ten months reminding me how replaceable I was. Evelyn spoke as though being a housemaid did not erase my rights.
Before she left, she gave me a business card and pointed at the bruises on my face. “Photographs. Medical records. Every text. We preserve everything.”
That evening, Lily called from campus. Her financial-aid administrator had found the sponsor behind the anonymous tuition payment. It had come through a charitable account administered by DeLuca Resolution Group.
My hands went cold.
“Did they tell you who authorized it?” I asked.
“Not yet. But they said the payment wasn't illegal by itself. They're reviewing it.”
At almost the same moment, Matteo sent a screenshot from a foundation board agenda dated for the day after the engagement dinner.
SPECIAL SESSION: EMERGENCY TRANSFER OF HARBOR HOUSE ASSETS FOLLOWING BENEFICIARY HEALTH EVENT.
The agenda had been circulated before Bianca tried to serve crab to his allergic child.
I read it twice, listening to Lily breathe at the other end of the phone.
The dinner, the stolen medication, the cameras, the ambulance, the clinic, and the waterfront building were all pieces of the same machine.
Bianca hadn't been arranging one cruel surprise.
She had been arranging a future in which Sofia would be too ill to speak, Matteo too frightened to think, and a foundation built for sick children would be sold while the people who loved it were looking somewhere else.
But Sofia had remembered the conversation under the desk. And for the first time, we knew the name of the man who had promised Bianca a way to turn a child's pain into a property transaction.
May you like
Dario Romano.
A member of the family Matteo had trusted all his life.
