“Well, I ought to sit down.” Nell looked at her with an expression so tender that Selene had to fight the urge to turn away. “He told me you were teaching yourself Italian from the labels on soup cans.”
“I was seven.”
“He thought you could learn anything.”
Selene swallowed. She had wanted to hear her father's voice again for four years. Instead she was hearing the way he had spoken about her to someone else. It was unexpectedly worse.
Nell led them into a small dining room and unlocked a metal filing cabinet. She removed a red cloth-bound ledger, two folders of copied checks, and a packet of signed acknowledgments.
“These were entrusted to me by the families,” she said. “Not your father, not Orsini, not the city. The families. If you want copies, they decide what can be shared.”
Dante nodded. “I understand.”
“Do you? Because your companies have been charging rent against properties our settlement was supposed to protect.”
The accusation landed with physical force. Dante reached for a statement, then stopped. “Show me.”
Nell opened a folder. After the fire, Vittorio Valerio had promised to fund medical care, retraining, and housing assistance for the nineteen families and other affected workers. The payments were not a gift. Investigators had found serious safety failures at the warehouse, and the money came from settlements and insurance proceeds. The trustees held assets for beneficiaries. Those funds were supposed to remain separate from the Valerio family's business operations.
“Instead, the trust bought buildings,” Nell said. “Then the management passed to an Orsini company. Rent rose. Repairs stopped. People who had lost husbands, fathers, lungs, were told they owed money to a landlord using the same funds meant to help them.”
Selene examined the papers. Some bore real signatures. Others were photocopies with suspiciously identical pen strokes. Several properties had been refinanced through companies whose ownership ended in a shell controlled by the Valerio group.
Dante turned over a page. At the bottom was his signature.
He stared at it.
“I approved the refinancing package,” he said.
Nell folded her hands. “Did you read it?”
“Then I recommend you learn.”
The room felt smaller. For the first time Selene had seen, Dante did not have a clever reply.
He looked at the ledger again. “I was told the trust had been settled years earlier. That this was ordinary commercial property.”
“Ordinary to whom?” Nell asked. “My sister uses a walker. She hasn't had reliable hot water in six weeks. She would probably be interested in your definition.”
Selene watched the lesson arrive. It was harder than the manuscript, and infinitely more important.
Dante put down the documents with care. “I will have an independent accounting done. I'll pay for it without touching the trust. You choose the accountant, and your lawyer approves the access.”
Nell considered him. “Good beginning. Not the end.”
“No,” he said. “Not the end.”
They spent two more hours with Nell. Selene copied authorized pages and drew a chronology. Nell showed her a receipt for a package Dmitri had sent years after the fire, near the end of a long illness. Inside had been a note requesting that Nell keep the originals safe if he could not. Selene recognized the phrasing as her father's. He had never been comfortable asking another person for help.
“Why did he wait?” she asked.
“Because he was trying to get witnesses to agree on what happened. Some were frightened. Some had been paid settlements with conditions they didn't understand. And some thought exposing it would take away the last money their children had.”
“Did he ever confront Orsini?”
“Once. Came back shaking.”
“Did he say what Orsini told him?”