The Monster In Us

38- if yoU're reading this

Another few days go by and I try my best to stop thinking about Dante. It's over, whatever we had, and I need to accept that. I need to let it go and make my peace with that. We had a good run, we said our goodbyes, it's done. I didn't think that saying goodbye to somebody, especially Dante Berardi, would ever be this hard. I still can't stop thinking about him.

Today, I am meeting with my father and Sergei to go over everything that I'd found at the Berardi to see what we can do with that information and to see if I had retrieved the information that my father was looking for.

"There's nothing about Alma coming back," I tell my father at the beginning of our conversation. "Not one mention of her name in the entire system."

"What else did you find?" He asks me.

"I got a lot of stuff," I explain. "Shipment schedules, employee profiles, income statements, emails, all of that. It's too much to really show you but there's nothing that we can really use."

"What if they weren't talking about Alma by her name?" Sergei suggests. "They could have been using a pseudonym for privacy's sake. We can't rule out that she's still in the equation."

"I don't think that it's happening," I shake my head at them. "Whatever you heard about Alma coming back was either a lie or it was bait to get you to retaliate."

"What were you talking to Dante Berardi about?" My father completely changes the subject. "He was here for over an hour the other day and you turned off your security. What business do you have with him anymore?"

"We worked closely when I was there," I try to explain to him without telling him the extent of the situation. "And he was angry when he found out who I was. He just wanted answers."

"And so you gave him answers?" He asks me disapprovingly.

"No, I just talked to him," I say. "It's irrelevant to anything that we're doing here."

"I heard that you had found a lake house," Sergei changes the subject. "What did you find there?"

I pause, trying to think of what I should say. I can't tell my father about what I found in that basement, all of that stuff about my mother, because I don't know where he stands on it. I don't know if he knows about it and that he was looking for it to destroy all of the evidence that Giovanni has found. Maybe he doesn't know about it at all because he doesn't know that Giovanni wasn't in charge of my mother's death. Either way, I'm not going to tell him what I found until I get the truth for myself.

"Nothing," I respond after a moment of thought. "It's just a place of leisure, there was nothing."

"How did you find it?"

"Somebody told me about it."

"Dante?" My father assumes.

"No," I lie quickly. "Will you stop with that? You told me to get close to the Berardis and so I did so why are you giving me shit for that now? I did what you told me to do."

"I'm worried that you took it too far," He leans back in his chair, watching me to assess my reaction to his accusation.

"Well, I didn't," I mutter. "So let's just go over what I did find instead you patronizing me for doing my job."

He is losing his temper; I can see his old fist starting to curl which is something that he does when he gets angry. I calm down my attitude so that I don't get backhanded.

"These are all of the logs that I deemed important enough to point out," I hand over a thick file of documents that I'd found in the Berardi system with Coleman's help. "I'm not sure how much use you'll get out of them but that's your job."