Chapter 8 - THE ROOM UNDER THE CHURCH
We returned to Philadelphia three days later.
My father welcomed me like a prodigal daughter.
That was how I knew he was terrified.
He kissed both my cheeks.
Called me tesoro.
Ordered my favorite dinner.
Pretended the last week had not happened.
Olindo sat across from me wearing the expression of a man waiting to reclaim property.
I smiled.
Small.
Polite.
Empty.
The old Veronica.
They relaxed.
That was useful.
I told them Austo had released me.
That was not entirely a lie.
He had never held me.
My father asked why I came back.
“I don’t want war.”
That was also true.
I wanted truth.
War was simply what men called truth when it threatened them.
The wedding was rescheduled for Sunday.
Three days.
That night, while the house slept, I entered the chapel beside my father’s estate.
Sofia’s brass key opened a small iron door beneath the altar.
Stone steps descended underground.
Austo waited outside the property.
He had refused to come closer unless I asked.
Again.
Choice.
I descended alone.
At the bottom was a narrow room.
One desk.
One safe.
Old filing cabinets.
Dust.
My father had searched for this place for decades.
My biological mother knew the key.
Inside the safe were ledgers dating back thirty years.
Payments.
Judges.
Police officials.
Politicians.
Businesses.
Every alliance my father called loyalty written as numbers.
But one file was separate.
CASTILLION, SOFIA.
I opened it.
The first page was not financial.
It was a birth record.
Mine.
Father:
Vittorio Bellucci.
Mother:
Sofia Castillion.
I had expected that.
What I did not expect was the second page.
A paternity test performed weeks later.
Probability of paternity:
0.00%.
My hands went numb.
Vittorio Bellucci was not my biological father.
I kept reading.
A different name appeared in the physician’s confidential notes.
DOMINIC CASTILLION.
Austo’s father.
I stopped breathing.
No.
Impossible.
Then I understood the dates.
Sofia had married into the Castillion family.
Dominic had been her father-in-law.
Unless the document meant something else.
I read again.
Then saw the correction page clipped beneath it.
The physician had originally mislabeled family names.
The biological father was not Dominic.
It was his younger brother.
Matteo Castillion.
A man who died before I was born.
I stared at the paper.
Austo Castillion was not simply the dangerous stranger whose car I entered.
He was my blood relative.
May you like
My cousin.
And my father had spent twenty-two years raising a Castillion daughter as a Bellucci bargaining chip.
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