Chapter 2 - The Silent War
By two o'clock that afternoon, Clara had established two things: Lorenzo Moretti was not demented, and he hated her with every remaining ounce of his strength.
The master bedroom suite had its own bathroom, a cavernous space lined with green marble and silver fixtures that looked like they hadn't been changed since 1974. Clara set up her workstation on the marble counter: her stethoscope, a digital blood pressure cuff, vials of saline, alcohol swabs, and three small plastic cups containing his afternoon cardiac pills.
When she walked back into the bedroom, Lorenzo was still sitting in his wheelchair. He hadn't shifted an inch.
"Time for blood pressure, Mr. Moretti," she said, pulling a wooden chair up beside him.
She didn't ask for permission. She reached down, took his limp, paralyzed right arm, and began wrapping the blue nylon cuff around his bicep.
Lorenzo’s left hand struck like a coiled snake.
His fingers locked around her right forearm, his grip surprisingly dry and iron-hard for an eighty-one-year-old man who lived on liquid broth. His fingernails, clipped blunt and square, dug straight through her blue scrub top into her skin.
Clara stopped. She didn't pull back. Pulling back was how you got bruised, and it was how patients learned they could control you with pain.
She looked down at his face. His jaw was locked, his nostrils flaring with shallow, ragged breaths. He was staring up at her, waiting for her to yell, to call for the guards standing outside the door, to show the same tearful terror the last three nurses had shown before they ran back to the agency.
"You have a strong grip," Clara said conversationally. "That’s good. It means your collateral circulation is holding up. Now let go so I can pump this up, or your reading is going to be two hundred over a hundred and I'll have to give you a shot in the butt."
Lorenzo didn't move. He tightened his grip, his thumb pressing directly into the radial nerve on her wrist. A sharp, hot needle of pain shot up Clara’s arm to her elbow.
She didn't blink. She simply leaned down until her face was six inches from his ear.
"I’ve worked twelve-hour shifts in trauma bays where men were actively throwing up blood on my shoes while trying to bite my thumb off, Mr. Moretti," she whispered, her tone dry as bone. "You're very scary, I'm sure. But you're not scary enough to make me quit before five o'clock. I need the overtime."
The old man’s black eyes shifted. A tiny muscle near the corner of his left eyelid twitched once.
Very slowly, one finger at a time, he uncurled his hand from her wrist and let it fall back onto the wool blanket.
"Thank you," Clara said. She smoothed her scrub sleeve down, placed the stethoscope bell over his brachial artery, and began pumping the rubber bulb.
Behind them, the heavy oak door stood three inches ajar.
Matteo Moretti was standing in the hallway, his arms crossed over his chest, watching through the crack. His chief security officer, a massive, scarred man named Gianni, stood half a step behind him.
"She touched him," Gianni whispered, his voice like grinding stones. "The last girl didn't even get the cuff on his arm before he threw the water glass at her head. Should I tell her to back off?"
"No," Matteo said quietly. He watched Clara deflate the cuff, write three numbers on a small yellow notepad, and tuck the pad into her pocket without looking toward the door. "Leave her alone. Let's see if she makes it to dinner."
Dinner arrived at five-thirty on a silver tray carried by a young, pale housemaid whose hands trembled so badly the fine porcelain bowl of chicken broth rattled against its saucer.
"Put it on the table," Clara told the girl. "And bring a cup of warm chamomile tea with two spoons of honey."
"Mr. Matteo said no hot liquids," the maid whispered, her eyes darting nervously toward the wheelchair where Lorenzo sat like a stone statue. "He said... he said the old boss might spill it on purpose."
"I'll hold the cup," Clara said. "Go get the tea."
The girl vanished like a ghost escaping a vault.
Clara pulled a small mahogany side table over to Lorenzo's chair. She set the broth down, pulled a spoon from her pocket, and filled it half-full.
"Open up," she said.
Lorenzo turned his head three inches to the left, staring at the dark wallpaper.
"Mr. Moretti," Clara said, leaning back in her chair. "We can do this the simple way, or we can sit here until eight o'clock when my shift ends. I get paid by the hour. You're the one sitting here smelling like cold chicken soup."
He didn't move.
Clara set the spoon down with a sharp clack. She stood up, walked over to the corner of the room where a high, carved oak bookcase stood, and looked at the titles. Most were bound in heavy dark leather—books on Italian history, Roman military strategy, maritime law, and leather-bound ledgers from the 1970s.
On the middle shelf, tucked between two legal texts, was a small, worn paperback edition of Dante’s Inferno, printed in parallel Italian and English.
Clara pulled it off the shelf, blew a thin layer of dust off the top edge, and walked back to her chair. She sat down, crossed her legs, and opened the book to Canto I.
"Midway upon the journey of our life," Clara read aloud, her voice calm, clear, and unhurried, "I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost."
In the wheelchair, Lorenzo’s left hand twitched against the wool blanket.
Clara kept reading. She didn't look up at him. She read five stanzas in English, her pronunciation plain and unadorned, then paused at the bottom of the page.
"Ah how hard a thing it is to say," she read, "What was this forest savage, rough, and stern, which in the very thought renews the fear."
"It's better in Italian," a voice said from the doorway.
Clara turned her head. Matteo was leaning against the doorframe, a glass of amber scotch in his hand.
"I don't speak Italian, Mr. Moretti," Clara said. "I speak night shifts and vitals charts. But he likes the rhythm."
She looked back at Lorenzo. The old man hadn't turned his head toward his son. His eyes were fixed on the open book in Clara’s hands, his chest rising and falling in a slow, deep rhythm that was quieter than it had been all morning.
"He taught himself Latin when he was twelve," Matteo said, stepping into the room. He walked to the edge of the rug, looking down at his father with a strange, guarded distance, like a man looking at a live grenade he had inherited from his grandfather. "He read Latin, Italian, and French. He used to quote Cicero when he was deciding who got the concrete distribution contracts in Boston."
"He's not quoting anyone now," Clara said, setting the book down beside the broth. "Because nobody talks to him like he's still alive. You talk about him while standing four feet away from his chair."
Matteo’s eyes narrowed. The amber liquor in his glass swirled as his hand tightened. "Be careful, Miss Jenkins."
"I'm always careful, Mr. Moretti," Clara said, picking up the broth spoon again. "It's part of my job description."
She held the spoon out to Lorenzo again. "Soup, Mr. Moretti. Or I read the next Canto in a terrible Midwestern accent."
The old man turned his head back. He looked at Clara for three long, dark seconds. Then, with a slow, deliberate movement that seemed to cost him every ounce of his pride, he opened his mouth half an inch.
May you like
Clara fed him the soup.
Matteo stood in the doorway, his scotch untouched, watching his father swallow the broth without throwing the spoon across the room. He didn't say a word. He turned around and walked down the dark hallway, his footsteps heavy against the runner.
