Chapter 12
Matteo confronted his chief of staff, Daniel Mercer, the next morning.
Daniel had worked for him for eleven years.
He did not deny suppressing the complaints.
His hands remained folded on his lap.
His eyes did not.
They kept dropping.
“Why?”
Daniel swallowed.
“Veronica said Lily was struggling with boundaries.”
“That isn't what I asked.”
Daniel’s breath left slowly.
“She said bringing every domestic complaint to you would make you pull away from the engagement.”
Matteo stared.
“And that mattered to you because?”
Silence.
Matteo waited.
Daniel finally answered.
“Things were calmer with her around.”
Matteo’s expression changed.
Daniel continued.
“You were sleeping again. Traveling less. The council meetings stopped running until three in the morning. People could talk to you.”
Matteo said nothing.
Daniel’s motive was not money.
Not loyalty to Veronica.
Fear of losing the version of Matteo that appeared when he was happy.
So when staff complained, Daniel minimized.
When Lily wrote letters and asked employees to mail them, Veronica told Daniel the child was acting out.
He believed the adult.
He preserved Matteo’s peace by filtering out his daughter’s distress.
Matteo rubbed one hand slowly across his jaw.
“You decided which truths I could handle.”
“Yes.”
“Because you're afraid of me.”
Daniel looked up.
His voice was almost inaudible.
“Everyone is.”
The sentence stayed in the room.
Matteo had spent years believing fear made people honest.
Daniel’s confession proved the opposite.
Fear made people edit reality.
Matteo dismissed him from the chief-of-staff role but did not erase his cooperation from the review.
Then he went upstairs.
Lily sat on the floor building a cardboard house.
Matteo lowered himself beside her.
She looked at him.
“Veronica gone?”
“Yes.”
“Richard?”
“Yes.”
Lily considered that.
Then asked:
“Are you going away too?”
Matteo’s chest tightened.
“No.”
Her eyes stayed on him.
“You always say that.”
The words were simple.
The accusation was enormous.
Then Lily reached beneath the cardboard house.
She pulled out another envelope.
May you like
Matteo recognized Veronica’s handwriting.
His daughter had hidden one of Veronica’s letters too.
