Chapter 4 - The High-Rise View
The address on the brass tag led to a quiet, brick residential building overlooking the city park, far removed from the bustling downtown district where the restaurant sat. When I unlocked the heavy oak door of Apartment 4B, the space inside looked less like a home and more like an archive of a life half-lived. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the walls, and every flat surface was crowded with framed photographs of rugged mountain ranges, old olive groves, and people whose faces carried the unmistakable Paolini bone structure.
Don Salvatore sat by the window in a high-backed velvet armchair, a wool blanket draped over his knees. The silver-handled cane leaned against the armrest within easy reach. He didn't turn as I stepped inside, but his reflection in the glass tracked my movement.
"You came," he said softly.
"Marco didn't want me to," I replied, closing the door quietly behind me and slipping the brass key into my jacket pocket.
Don Salvatore let out a dry, rattling chuckle. "Marco sees enemies everywhere because that is all he has ever been trained to fight. He thinks protection means locking everything away in a vault. He doesn't understand that some things are meant to be brought into the light."
He pointed a shaky, age-spotted finger toward a low wooden coffee table in the center of the room. Resting on top of it was an open leather-bound ledger, its pages yellowed and brittle with age, covered in cramped, elegant ink handwriting.
"Read it," Don Salvatore instructed.
I stepped closer, kneeling beside the table. The handwriting was faint, written in Italian, but the marginalia and specific family names were annotated in the very same dialect I had spoken at the restaurant table. *Divi Viniti.* We are arrived.
"She didn't just leave, Tessa," Don Salvatore said, his voice cracking slightly. "We were supposed to cross together. I had the papers, the passage, the whole life mapped out in the valley. But the night before we were to board the cart, my family stepped in. They had other plans for my name, other alliances that required a clean ledger. They forced her out."
May you like
I traced my finger over the dried ink. "She thought you chose them over her."
"Every single day of my life, I have lived with the weight of that silence," he whispered, turning his head to look at me directly. "She never wrote back. For sixty years, I thought she burned every memory of us. And then a blonde girl in a white shirt poured water into my glass and spoke the password of our childhood."
Related Stories
