Part 4 — The Rich Mafia Boss Demanded Answers After My Dish — and the Old Woman Sitting Beside Him Suddenly Turned Pale

…the sound of Dario’s footsteps disappeared in the corridor, but his last words remained in the room.

“The car went along the northern road. The license plate is false.”

Cassius picked up the phone.

“Call the police,” I said.

He looked at me.

“The police are already involved.”

“Then why were you hiding everything?”

“Because we have Palermo’s people in the police too.”

Silvio immediately dialed another number. His voice sounded calm, but the phone he held was trembling so much that he could not hide it.

“The clinic director? Preserve all the security recordings. Do not let anyone delete them. Now.”

Cassius extended his hand toward me.

“Get into the car.”

“I will go with Laia.”

“If this is a trap, you are also a target.”

“She is my sister.”

“That is exactly why I am asking you to trust me.”

“All my life I trusted others, and in the end we lost everything.”

Pain passed across his face.

“Then choose for yourself for the first time.”

These words strangely calmed me. Not because I had accepted Cassius as my father. I still could not do that. It was simply the first time he did not treat me as if someone else had to make every decision in my life.

Outside, the rain was still falling. The car’s headlights spread into long strips across the wet stones.

We traveled the road to the clinic in silence. Cassius sat beside me, his hands resting on his knees, while the metal wheels of the wheelchair made a slight noise at every turn.

The hospital security had the recordings waiting for us.

A man in a doctor’s coat appeared on the screen. Behind him they were rolling Laia’s bed away. The man looked at the camera, and his face appeared for a moment.

I recognized him immediately.

“Dario,” I said.

Everyone in the room fell silent.

Dario had been with us a few minutes earlier. He had told us that Laia had been kidnapped.

Cassius closed his eyes.

“No,” he said. “He could not have.”

“But he did,” I replied.

They turned on the sound of the video. Dario’s own words were heard in the recording:

“We will transfer the girl to another clinic. You will never let Wayne find out.”

I leaned against the wall. A few minutes earlier this man had looked into my eyes and stood calmly. His lie sounded so clean that it resembled the truth.

Cassius struck the table with his fist.

“Where is he taking Laia?”

Silvio pointed to a small mark in the corner of the screen.

“The freight elevator. He would take the car out to the industrial port.”

Cassius immediately made several calls. One man refused him, the second did not answer the phone, and the third told him only this:

“Sir, this time even your name is not enough.”

Cassius slowly lowered the phone.

“This is the first time people have run away from me,” he said.

“Then perhaps this is the first time you are telling them the truth,” I said.

He nodded.

“Dario has worked for me for twenty-five years. I saved his family. And he took my family away from me.”

The police arrived at the port before us. They found Dario with Laia in an old warehouse. He had the documents and money necessary for the operation, but the doctors themselves were not there. He wanted to take Laia abroad in order to finally destroy Cassius’s family out of revenge.

Laia was returned to us alive.

Her hands were cold when I found her on the stretcher.

“Marin,” she said quietly. “I thought I would never see you again.”

“I am here.”

Cassius stood several steps away. Laia looked at him.

“Is this the man?”

I could not answer.

Cassius bent down before her as far as he could from the wheelchair.

“I am Cassius. I will force nothing on you. Neither my surname nor my life. I simply want you to know—I did not want to save you because you are my daughter. I wanted to because you are Laia.”

Laia looked at him for a long time.

“Marin tells me who you were in her life. I will decide for myself who you will be in mine.”

Cassius’s eyes lit up.

“Fair.”

The next day we gave testimony against Dario. The camera recordings, the documents kept in the metal box, and the clinic papers proved sufficient. Cassius gave the prosecutor his secret accounts for the first time, and the entire network collapsed.

He did not shout at Dario in court.

He told him only once:

“You hid behind my words. Now no one will be able to protect you from your own words.”

Dario could not answer.

When the recording was played in the courtroom, he heard his own voice. At first he held his head high. Then his shoulders drooped. Finally, he lowered his eyes.

I did not feel relief that day. Only emptiness.

When we returned home, Edith’s room was empty. The old woman had been taken to the hospital because for the first time in a long while she was speaking independently, and the doctors wanted to examine her condition.

One thing remained on the windowsill—a small porcelain bowl with a golden leaf painted on its edge. The bowl had belonged to my mother. Edith told me that Elena drank tea from it every morning.

Cassius did not lock the door of the room.

“This may also be your home, if you ever want it,” he told me.

“I do not yet know whether I want a home whose walls hid so much from me.”

“Then the door will remain open.”

Three weeks later, Laia’s operation was performed.

For six hours I sat in the hospital corridor. Cassius was beside me. He was wearing a black jacket and holding my grandmother’s recipe notebook in his hands.

“Are you reading again?” I asked.

“No. I am simply afraid that if I close it, everything will disappear again.”

The operation was successful.

Laia opened her eyes the next morning.

“I want coffee,” she said.

I burst out laughing. It was such a simple desire that at that moment I thought it was the greatest miracle in the world.

Months passed.

I opened a small culinary workshop in the center of the city. Cassius offered me money, but I took only as much as I needed to begin the rent. The rest went into a fund in his name that financed operations for poor patients.

Laia was slowly learning to walk for a long time. Every morning she exercised, and then she came to my kitchen and cut the ingredients chaotically.

“This onion is very big,” I would tell her.

“You talk too much too.”

“I am your boss.”

“And I am your only sister.”

Laughter returned to the house.

Edith recovered part of her memory. One day she took my hand and told me:

“Your mother always said that you were the most stubborn.”

“She was right.”

“And the kindest too.”

I could not answer that. I only lowered my head.

Cassius came to the workshop once a week. At first he stopped at the door, as if waiting for permission. Then Laia threw an apron at him jokingly.

“If you are our father, you must know how to cut potatoes too.”

Cassius picked up the knife.

“I used to rule half the city.”

“Here you rule only potatoes.”

That was the first time he laughed.

Accepting him as my father did not happen in one day. Nor did it happen like a fairy tale. Sometimes anger returned to me. I would ask why he had not found us earlier, why he had allowed other people to decide everything instead of us.

He always listened to me.

“Not every answer can heal you,” he told me once. “But you are still entitled to every answer.”

The first snow came at the end of November.

From the workshop window I watched the white covering spread over the street. Laia sat at the table and was writing a new recipe according to our grandmother’s notebook. Beside it lay a picture drawn with colored pencils: four people in a small kitchen, and in the middle a bowl with golden leaves.

Cassius sent me a message that evening.

“If you want, let us return home again. Everything will be as you want.”

I looked at the screen for a long time.

Then I wrote back:

“I do not need to return home anymore. I am already home. But you can come for dinner tomorrow.”

The answer came immediately.

“I will come.”

I put the phone down and opened my grandmother’s notebook. Inside the brown cover, where there was a small scratch from the years, I discovered one sentence from my mother that I had not noticed before:

“Food has taste only when a place at the table remains for everyone to return to.”

I placed the bowl with golden leaves in the kitchen.

It was snowing outside.

Inside, for the first time, no one was afraid to return anymore.