YOU ARE THE SHAME OF MY NAME — UNTIL HIS SILENT WIFE FINALLY WALKED AWAY / Chapter 2 / 20

Chapter 2 - The Name on the Photograph| I read the note six times before I called the number printed beneath it.

No one answered.

I called again, and this time a man's voice came through, low and careful.

“You received the photograph.”

“Who are you?”

“Someone who knew your mother before she died.”

My grip tightened around the phone.

“My mother died when I was sixteen.”

“I know.”

“Then tell me something only someone who knew her would know.”

Silence followed.

“Your mother used to keep a blue sewing box beneath the kitchen sink. Inside it, she hid letters she couldn't bring herself to send.”

My stomach dropped.

The sewing box had been one of the few things I kept after her funeral. I had opened it once as a teenager and found nothing except thread, old buttons, and a broken thimble. Years later, I had donated it when I moved into the Romano estate.

“Who are you?” I demanded.

“Someone who made a mistake by trusting Adrian's family.”

“Then you have the wrong person. I don't live with Adrian anymore.”

“That's precisely why I'm calling.”

The line went dead.

I sat on the edge of my mattress, staring at the photograph. Whoever had taken it had been standing near the estate's eastern gate. The angle showed my face clearly, but there was something else in the background: a dark sedan parked beneath a tree.

Its license plate had been deliberately obscured.

I called the police, then hung up before the operator answered. What could I report? An anonymous photograph and a vague threat involving a woman who had been dead for nearly fifteen years?

At three that afternoon, I walked to a public library and searched my mother's name.

Eleanor Bennett had been an accountant at a charitable organization called the Bellweather Children's Trust. The trust had funded medical treatment, foster care, and emergency housing for children across New York.

According to the short obituary I found, she had died in a car accident on a rainy road outside the city.

There was no mention of her work.

No mention of the trust.

And no explanation for why the obituary had been published in a newspaper three weeks after her funeral.

I printed the page and folded it into my notebook.

Then I searched Adrian Romano.

The results were predictable: photographs at charity events, business profiles, and carefully worded articles describing him as a shipping magnate with extensive investments in real estate. Nothing mentioned the rumors that surrounded his family. Nothing explained why men lowered their voices whenever his name came up.

Victor Moretti appeared in several photographs beside him.

In one, taken twelve years earlier, Victor stood next to a woman whose face looked strangely familiar.

I enlarged the image.

The woman wore a simple navy dress. Her dark hair was pinned at the back of her head, and she held a folder against her chest.

It was my mother.

I leaned closer to the screen, certain that exhaustion had made me see things.

But there was no mistaking her.

The photograph's caption identified the event as a Bellweather Trust fundraising dinner. Victor Moretti was listed as a principal donor.

I copied the article's details into my notebook.

That evening, I received a message from an unknown number.

Your mother did not die because of the weather.

A second message arrived before I could respond.

If you want the truth, meet me tomorrow at noon. Grand Central Terminal. Information booth. Come alone.

I didn't sleep that night.

Part of me wanted to delete everything and disappear into the ordinary life I had barely begun to build. Another part remembered the way Adrian had looked at me in his study—not angry that I was hurt, but offended that I had dared to say so.

For three years, I had believed his silence meant indifference.

Now I wondered whether it had meant something worse.

At eleven fifty-five the next morning, I stood near the information booth at Grand Central, clutching my notebook inside my coat.

A woman in a gray scarf approached me.

She was perhaps sixty, with tired eyes and a scar running along her jaw.

“You look like Eleanor,” she said.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Margaret Hale. I worked with your mother.”

She glanced over my shoulder.

“Before I tell you anything, you need to understand one thing.”

“What?”

“Adrian Romano isn't the only person who will want you silent.”