Chapter 3 - The Coldness of White Roses
Emily remembered Sofia Moretti clearly, unlike the rest of the estate's staff who had quickly scrubbed the missing woman's memory from their daily chatter. While the large oil portrait of Sofia had been violently unhooked from the grand staircase three years prior, the impression she left behind remained untouched in the child's mind.
Sofia hadn’t treated Emily like an invisible nuisance or a servant’s collateral. Once, when Grace had been overwhelmed with folding endless mountains of monogrammed linen, Sofia had sat down directly on the laundry room floor in an expensive couture dress, helping five-year-old Emily construct an elaborate cardboard castle out of shipping boxes.
She had also possessed a peculiar disdain for white roses during winter.
Emily vividly recalled standing in the conservatory years ago when Sofia had plucked a frost-white rose from a holiday floral arrangement, grimacing as she turned the stem in her fingers. “Some things look beautiful because nobody asks if they belong where they were put,” Sofia had whispered with a wink. “White roses in winter are just pretending they aren’t cold.”
Standing now in the grand ballroom, Emily’s eyes drifted across the expansive room. The entire space was suffocatingly decorated with hundreds of pristine white roses. They cascaded down the marble fireplace, choked the edges of the signing table, and framed an oversized engagement portrait of Vincent and Isabella.
The visual dissonance struck Emily with sharp clarity. These weren't flowers chosen for romance; they were flowers chosen to overwrite a ghost.
Then her gaze locked onto Isabella’s neck. Resting against the plunging neckline of the ivory dress was a delicate silver pendant shaped like two intertwining leaves curling around a deep blue gemstone.
Emily’s breath hitched. She had seen that exact pendant before. Not in a magazine, and not on Isabella.
"Don't stare," Grace had hissed softly, noticing her daughter's intense gaze from across the room.
"Mom," Emily had whispered back, her fingers nervously tracing the outline of the heavy phone hidden beneath her sweater. "The old phone—"
Grace nearly dropped the heavy silver coffee pot, her knuckles turning bone-white. "Where did you get it?"
"Your sewing box."
Grace set the pot down with agonizing slowness, her face paralyzed by a fear more palpable than any threat Vincent Moretti had ever issued. "Put it back."
"But it said Sofia."
May you like
"Emily," Grace muttered, using a terrifying, flat tone that brooked no argument. "Put it back right now, and swear to me you will never speak that name in this house again."
But it was already too late. Because as Charles Bellamy handed Vincent the pen, Emily had realized that the phone in her sweater was vibrating again. The final percent of battery life wasn't dying—it was transmitting.
