Chapter 19 - Six Months Later, First Snow in Chicago
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Six months later, the first heavy snow of winter blanketed Michigan Avenue in powdery white, turning the limestone towers along the Chicago River into a quiet postcard.
On the first Tuesday of March, my divorce from Adrian Moretti had been finalized without a single contested hearing. True to the desperate promise he had made on his knees in my office, Adrian had instructed his attorneys not to fight a single clause, signing over the Gold Coast penthouse, the Lake Forest summer house, and half of his liquid accounts without asking for a cent back.
I had sold the Gold Coast penthouse the following week and donated the proceeds to Grandmother Eleanor’s pediatric wing.
Under my leadership—and with Lorenzo and Victoria visiting from New York once a month like proud parents—Moretti Hospitality and Security had just posted the highest quarterly earnings in its forty-year history. Sophia Reynolds and Julian Cross had both pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud and attempted grand larceny in January, earning eight and twelve years respectively in federal prison.
And Adrian?
According to Lorenzo, Adrian had moved into a sparse one-bedroom apartment near the shipping docks in Bridgeport. He didn't attend galas anymore. He didn't drink at the private clubs. He worked sixteen hours a day on the cargo terminals, and every single evening at six o'clock sharp—for one hundred and eighty consecutive nights—his black sedan parked across the street from the Moretti Grand Hotel in the snow, sitting there quietly until the lights in my fortieth-floor office went dark and my security detail drove me safely home to my new townhouse in Lincoln Park.
He never called. He never approached my car. He just watched from across the street, guarding from a distance the wife he had failed to cherish when she was beside him.
On that snowy Thursday afternoon in April, Henrik Laurent—the seventy-eight-year-old master jeweler of Laurent & Sons on Oak Street—called my office personally.
"Mrs. Claire," the old artisan said gently over the line, "before I seal the final laser weld on the inner platinum bezel of your grandmother’s 1928 Cartier bracelet for its spring insurance vaulting, could you come down to my private workshop on Oak Street? Alone, if possible. While cleaning the microscopic glue residue Sophia’s jeweler left inside the hollow under-gallery beneath the center emerald, I found something Eleanor Moretti hid inside this bracelet thirty years ago."
My brow furrowed. "Hid inside the bracelet?"
"Yes, ma'am," Henrik whispered. "And there is an engraving inside the hidden compartment that instructs me never to show it to a single soul holding the Moretti bloodline—only to you."
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Twenty minutes later, my driver pulled up outside the wrought-iron gates of Laurent & Sons on Oak Street. Through the falling snow at the corner of Michigan Avenue, I caught a brief glimpse of Adrian’s familiar black sedan idling quietly fifty yards back, keeping its silent vigil from a block away.
I stepped inside the warm, velvet-lined vault room at the back of Henrik Laurent’s shop.
