Chapter 3 - Elliot Had Been Practicing a Story
Elliot talked only after Bernadette was removed from the room.
At seven years old, he carried himself differently from Theo.
Louder when adults approved.
Smaller when his mother was angry.
Luciano saw that difference clearly now.
Elliot sat at the far end of the breakfast table with both hands between his knees.
“You’re not in trouble either,” Luciano told him.
Elliot immediately asked:
“Is Mom?”
Luciano did not lie.
“She may be.”
Elliot lowered his eyes.
Luciano placed a photograph of the damaged diorama on the table.
“Did you and your mom move this?”
Elliot nodded reluctantly.
“What did she ask you to do?”
“She said we were fixing it.”
“Fixing what?”
“The crash.”
Luciano’s stomach tightened.
Elliot explained.
For several weeks, Bernadette and Marcus had spent evenings in the model showroom rearranging pieces of the track.
They moved the service road farther from the main curve.
Removed the white maintenance gate.
Changed where a miniature tree line stood.
Shifted a safety barrier.
Then Marcus would place a small red model car on the racetrack.
Not Theo’s car.
Another one.
Elliot was told to push it quickly around the outer curve until it fell from the track.
“What did they say?” Luciano asked.
Elliot stared at the table.
“Dad went too fast.”
The room went quiet.
“Whose dad?”
“My dad.”
Adrian.
Luciano forced himself to stay composed.
“Why were they making you do that?”
Elliot’s eyes filled.
“Mom said someone might ask me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ask you what?”
“Where Dad’s car went.”
Luciano leaned back slowly.
This wasn’t a private game.
They were rehearsing testimony.
“What happens if you put the car near the white gate?”
Elliot looked frightened.
“Mom gets mad.”
“Why?”
“She says there was no other road.”
Theo remembered another car.
Elliot was being taught there could not have been one.
Two children.
Two opposing versions.
One mother controlling the model.
Luciano looked toward the showroom.
The large diorama had once been an exact miniature of the estate’s private racetrack, constructed years earlier when Luciano and Adrian were teenagers. Every gate, maintenance lane, barrier, and curve had been replicated carefully.
But the real racetrack had been renovated after Adrian’s death.
The service road had been removed.
The gate no longer existed.
Which meant the model was one of the few surviving representations of how the track had looked on the night Adrian died.
Unless someone changed it.
May you like
And Bernadette and Marcus had been doing exactly that.
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