Chapter 2
The storage room didn't even measure forty square feet.
Buckets and bleach bottles crowded the floor. Shelving reached the ceiling, and everything smelled damp and moldy.
There wasn't a window. A single uncovered bulb buzzed above me.
Mom appeared behind my shoulder and raised her voice down the hall.
“Teresa! Get that extra mattress from the basement and bring it up.”
Teresa had been with us since before I could walk. When she rounded the corner and saw the little room, she stopped.
“Mrs. Moretti... you mean here?”
“Is something wrong with that?”
“No, ma'am. Nothing.”
She returned with a younger housekeeper a few minutes later. Between them they carried an old twin mattress, sunken in the center, with a yellow stain at one corner.
It wouldn't fit through the doorway flat. They turned it on its side, bumped a bucket, and spilled dirty mop water over the concrete.
Teresa put the mattress down on the wet patch.
She kept her gaze away from mine.
“I'm sorry, Miss Claire.” I could barely make out the words.
I faced the shelves, but it was too late to keep myself from crying.
To anyone passing the door, I would have been a girl in a janitor's closet, crying beside two housekeepers and a filthy mattress.
Nothing about it would have told them I was the Don's child.
That evening, two of Dad's capos came up to the estate with their wives to celebrate the move.
Food covered the length of the dining table: tiramisu, crisp fried mozzarella, fettuccine Alfredo coated in rich cream sauce.
It was all Grace's favorite food.
Partway through dinner, Paul Conti moved his chair back and raised his glass, smiling broadly at her.
“To the Don's little girl, and that lovely new bedroom of hers.”
Everyone lifted their wine. Glasses clinked.
Paul had carried me at my baptism.
No one thought his toast needed correcting.
Adrian made sure Grace's plate stayed full. Nathan peeled shrimp for her, one after the other.
I sat at the other end of the table and slowly ate a piece of bread.
Nobody asked why I wasn't eating anything else.
Once the visitors left, I went to the kitchen and put on a pan of arrabbiata, heavy on the Calabrian chiles. Just how I liked it.
The sauce hadn't finished simmering when Mom came in.
“What do you think you're doing?” She spoke quietly, but her anger made her voice tremble. “We served a full dinner. Now you're making your own, as if we let you go hungry? How do you think that makes Grace feel? Like she's done something to you?”
I stared at the pan, switched off the heat, and lifted it from the stove.
Then I emptied the whole thing into the garbage.
Grace appeared at the doorway, looking worried.
“Was dinner not good, Claire? I'm sorry. I'll ask the cook to make something you like next time.”
From the couch, Adrian kept scrolling on his phone. “Leave it, Gracie. She likes making a scene. Let her be miserable.”
Nathan didn't speak up.
He gave a small smile and continued peeling the shrimp Grace was still eating.
He wasn't doing it to hurt me. Somehow that hurt more. He genuinely didn't think he had any part in what had just happened.
I returned to the little room and locked myself in.
By then my stomach ached steadily with hunger. The kitchen was only a hall away. I couldn't bear to go back.
There wasn't enough open floor between the shelves for the whole mattress. Its far end curled up the wall, leaving me just enough space to curl up too.
Grace laughed on the other side of the wall. Nathan laughed a moment later.
I lay beneath my raised phone and reread what I had signed.
Five years living at the facility. Permission required to leave. No outgoing calls.
Professor Bennett had put my name forward herself. She said no one else in our department matched either my publications or my modeling work.
My family didn't know any of that.
The previous spring, a leading journal had accepted my first paper. I brought a printed copy of the acceptance email to Sunday dinner and laid it beside Mom's plate.
She read a few words. “Good for you.”
Then Grace held up the sketch she had made that afternoon, and everyone shifted their chairs to see it.
Later, a housekeeper cleared my letter away with the plates, tucked among used napkins.
At graduation, I won the department's highest research award. Dad was talking to a capo when I told him. He patted my shoulder without looking around. Nathan sent a one-word text an hour afterward: Great.
In this house, the things I worked for barely got a passing look.
I checked the date again. August 4.
In ten days, I could leave the windowless closet, the family that had never put my name on a door, and the boyfriend laughing nearby without asking where I was.
