Chapter 6 - THE PEOPLE WHO REMEMBERED DIFFERENTLY
Antonio did something his younger self would have considered beneath him.
He started calling former household staff.
Retired cooks.
Drivers.
A tutor.
A nurse who had cared for Vittorio after his heart attack.
The stories were remarkably consistent.
Vittorio was demanding.
Sometimes cold.
Frequently absent.
But the extreme punishments came from Lavinia.
One former driver remembered bringing Antonio home from school and finding him standing outside in winter without a coat because Lavinia said he had lied.
The driver brought him inside.
Lavinia threatened to fire him.
Vittorio later gave the driver a raise.
A retired cook remembered slipping Antonio food after Lavinia withheld dinner.
When Vittorio discovered it, he did not punish the cook.
He thanked her.
The nurse remembered Vittorio asking his lawyer to change who could make household decisions regarding his children while he was medically incapacitated.
“Did he?”
The woman hesitated.
“I thought so.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who was the lawyer?”
She gave Antonio a name.
Charles Grady.
Dead for twelve years.
But his old law firm still existed.
Antonio’s current attorney requested archived records.
A problem emerged immediately.
The file had been accessed fifteen years earlier.
By Lavinia.
There was no record of why.
One document was missing.
The petition Vittorio had drafted to remove Lavinia’s household authority.
Antonio sat in silence after learning that.
She had not merely told a different version of history.
At some point, she had deliberately gone looking for evidence that contradicted hers.
That shifted the question again.
What began as an investigation into Lucas’s mistreatment was becoming an examination of how a whole family had been trained to confuse Lavinia’s beliefs with Vittorio’s commands.
Antonio began to understand why everyone at the banquet had remained silent.
They were not only afraid of Lavinia.
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They believed she represented the founding rules of the family.
Antonio had believed it too.
