Chapter 7 — The Rossi House
608 Words
Her father's voice on the phone sounded thinner than she remembered, like the last few weeks had aged him a decade.
"You don't have to keep checking on me," Antonio Rossi said, though the relief in his voice when she suggested visiting gave him away completely. "I'm fine, Elena."
"I'm coming Sunday. Don't argue."
She half expected Damian to object — some new rule about appearances, about what the wife of Damian Cole could and couldn't be seen doing — but he only nodded when she told him over breakfast, distracted by something on his phone.
"Take the car," he said. "I'll have Marcus drive you."
"I can take a cab."
"Take the car, Elena." Something in his voice made it clear the conversation was over, and not, she noted, in the cold way he usually closed doors. This felt more like concern wearing the mask of an order.
Her childhood home looked smaller than she remembered, the way houses always do once you've lived somewhere bigger. Her father met her at the door looking exactly as tired as he'd sounded, but his face broke into something warmer than she'd seen from him in weeks the moment he saw her.
"There she is." He pulled her into a hug that smelled like the same aftershave he'd worn her whole life. "Married life treating you all right?"
"It's — complicated." She followed him into the kitchen, the same table, the same chipped mug he refused to replace. "Dad, can I ask you something?"
"Always."
"Did you know Damian before? Before all of this — the offer, the buyout. Did you know him when he was younger?"
Her father's hands stilled on the kettle for just a fraction of a second — so brief she might have imagined it, except she knew her father, and she knew exactly what that particular kind of stillness meant.
"Why do you ask?"
"Because he has a photo of himself as a teenager in his office, and he nearly took my head off when he caught me looking at it. Because he said something last night about losing everything when he was seventeen, and it sounded like it happened here, in this city, and I can't shake this feeling that I've met him before, a long time ago, and I don't know why."
Her father set the kettle down very carefully. When he turned to face her, something had shifted in his expression — guilt, maybe, or the particular exhaustion of a man carrying a weight he'd hoped never to set down in front of his daughter.
"Elena." He pulled out a chair, gesturing for her to sit. "There's something I should have told you before the wedding. I didn't, because I told myself it didn't matter anymore, that it was ancient history. I see now that was a coward's excuse."
Her stomach dropped. "Dad, you're scaring me."
"Twenty years ago, this company was smaller — your grandfather's company, really, I'd only just taken it over. There was a family we did business with. Suppliers. Good people, as I recall it, until a deal went bad and I made a decision that saved Rossi Textiles and ruined them completely." He wouldn't meet her eyes. "I told myself at the time it was just business. I've spent twenty years trying to believe that."
"What family?"
Her father looked up at her, and in his eyes she saw the answer arrive a full second before he said it out loud.
"The Coles," he said. "Elena, I ruined Damian Cole's family. And I don't think it's a coincidence that he's the one who ended up buying mine."
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