Chapter 3 - THE PICTURE ON THE FLOOR
Enzo had one brother.
Matteo Marino, forty-two, managed the family’s legitimate shipping company and served as guardian of the twins’ inheritance if Enzo died. He visited every Sunday carrying gifts the boys never opened.
Andrea did not ask Leo leading questions. She had spent three years caring for her younger sister after a violent car accident and had learned one principle from the trauma counselors: frightened children often borrowed an adult’s answer just to make the questions stop.
She sat beside the Lego scene.
“Show me.”
Leo moved the black car beside the blue house. He placed the red brick underneath. Luca added a white figure near the door, then covered it with his hand.
Thunder rolled. The twins abandoned the scene and climbed into the blanket fort.
Andrea photographed nothing. She wrote down the exact arrangement and the children’s exact words, then sealed the notes in an envelope with the time and date.
When Matteo arrived Sunday, the transformation was immediate. Luca hid behind a curtain. Leo swept every red Lego from the table and pushed them beneath a cabinet.
Matteo looked nothing like a monster. He wore a camel coat, remembered the staff’s birthdays, and knelt several feet from the children without approaching.
“I miss you boys,” he said.
Leo vomited on the carpet.
Enzo blamed the storm. Matteo blamed Andrea.
“She has been here four days,” Matteo said. “Now the boys are acting out and Enzo is hearing fairy tales about cars.”
Andrea had told only Mrs. Whitaker about the Lego scene.
Matteo should not have known.
Mrs. Whitaker admitted she reported everything to Enzo. Enzo had confronted Matteo privately.
The brothers’ argument ended with Enzo ordering an independent child psychologist, Dr. Miriam Cole, to evaluate the twins. Matteo objected that outsiders created risk. Enzo ignored him.
Dr. Cole confirmed the children exhibited trauma linked to a specific person or symbol, but she refused to identify Matteo based on play alone.
“A child’s reconstruction is information,” she told Enzo. “It is not a verdict.”
That same evening, police arrived at the mansion.
A groundskeeper had found Andrea’s bloodstained handkerchief inside Enzo’s locked office. Beside it lay Sofia’s missing diamond bracelet.
May you like
Enzo looked at Andrea with the coldness she had expected from him on the first night.
Someone had turned her injured palm into evidence.
