Chapter 6 - THE LEDGER’S LAST PAGE
Monday morning arrived with a high, pale sun that burned the mist off the boxwood hedges before seven o'clock.
In the great hall of the Valente estate, the marble floor had been washed until it shone like gray ice. The tall windows stood open an inch to let the crisp autumn air drift in from the garden, smelling of wet earth and crushed mint leaves from the pot on the back stoop.
Dominic Valente sat at his desk in the study.
The red leather ledger was gone—burned in the small brick fireplace behind the sideboard until nothing remained of the names, the dates, or the signatures except a drift of fine black ash that had already been swept away by the new maid before eight o'clock.
On the corner of the walnut desk lay the child’s drawing of the tall man with no mouth, flattened out beneath a heavy crystal paperweight. Beside it sat the gray plush rabbit, its hand-sewn seam mended with a neat, double-threaded yellow stitch that didn't match the rest of the fur.
The door to the study was open.
Outside, in the hallway, the small wooden chair sat exactly where it had always sat—its front edge worn smooth, its back legs scuffed pale from being dragged across the floor by hands too small to lift it.
A young woman in a gray wool dress stood by the tall window, her dark hair pinned back simply, holding a silver watering can over the clay pot where the mint plant was already putting out two small, bright green shoots toward the morning light.
Dominic did not look up from the shipping reports spread across his desk. But as the sound of water trickling into dry dirt reached him from the hall, he reached out with his left hand, picked up a fresh pen from the bronze stand, and wrote a single line on the blank cream stationery:
May you like
Case closed.
He didn't sign his name. He didn't need to. The house was quiet again, and for the first time in fifteen years, the man in the drawing had room enough to breathe.
