Chapter 3 - THE DAUGHTER HE BURIED WITHOUT A BODY
“No.”
It was the only word I had.
I said it again.
“No.”
Leo startled at my voice.
That stopped me from shouting.
Dante stood, keeping the table between us.
“I’m not asking you to believe me tonight.”
“Good, because I don’t.”
“I understand.”
“No, you don’t.”
I pointed at the photograph.
“You walk into my job after thirty-one years, show me one old picture, and suddenly you’re my father?”
“I did not know you were alive.”
I laughed.
It came out ugly.
“Convenient.”
“It isn’t convenient.”
His voice sharpened for the first time.
“I buried an empty coffin.”
That silenced me.
Even his bodyguards looked away.
Dante lowered his voice.
“Six weeks after you were born, Marisol disappeared with you. Two days later, a room registered under one of her names burned outside Revere.”
“My mother never used another name.”
“She used several.”
“You’re lying.”
“I hope you keep saying that until I can prove otherwise.”
That answer bothered me.
Liars usually hated being challenged.
Dante seemed to expect it.
“I was told two bodies were recovered.”
My anger faltered.
“Told by who?”
“My uncle.”
There was something in the way he said it.
Not suspicion.
Not yet.
Pain.
“Police?”
“My family handled too many things that police should have handled.”
At least he did not pretend otherwise.
“I was twenty,” he continued. “My father had enemies. So did I. Marisol had already been threatened.”
“By you?”
His silence lasted half a second too long.
“Not by me.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Dante looked at me directly.
“I frightened her sometimes.”
It was the first admission that felt real.
“I was angry. Arrogant. I thought protecting someone meant deciding everything for them. If Marisol believed you were safer without me, she had reasons.”
My chest hurt.
It would have been easier if he insisted he had been perfect.
Men like that were easy to hate.
Men who admitted just enough guilt were dangerous in another way.
“Then why did she tell me dragons were dangerous?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe because they are.”
“Yes.”
He did not flinch.
“Sometimes they are.”
Leo stretched toward me again.
I stepped farther back.
“No.”
His face crumpled.
“Please don’t.”
The words came out before I could stop them.
I was talking to a baby as though he had betrayed me.
Dante picked him up.
Leo twisted his entire little body toward me.
Then he said something soft.
“Ma.”
I froze.
Dante went still too.
“He doesn’t mean that,” he said quickly.
The ridiculousness of a mafia boss trying to reassure me about baby vocabulary almost made me cry.
“He says sounds.”
“Why does he keep reaching for me?”
Dante looked at the necklace.
Then he unbuttoned the top of Leo’s tiny vest.
Underneath was a thin chain designed to break safely if pulled.
A second blue enamel star rested against the baby’s shirt.
My hand went to mine.
They were nearly identical.
“His mother wore that every day,” Dante said.
“Sofia?”
“Yes.”
“You said he used to grab hers.”
“Constantly.”
I stared at Leo.
“You called him your baby.”
“I didn’t.”
Everyone else had assumed.
So had I.
Dante touched Leo’s hair.
“He is my grandson.”
That changed the shape of everything again.
“Sofia was your daughter.”
“Yes.”
“And she’s…”
“Dead.”
The word came quietly.
“Eight months ago.”
My stomach dropped.
The same amount of time my mother had been missing.
Dante saw me make the connection.
“She died in a car accident,” he said. “Four nights before your mother disappeared.”
I sat down without meaning to.
Dante waited before doing the same.
“Why would my mother know your daughter?”
“That is what I have spent eight months trying to learn.”
“You knew Marisol was alive?”
“Not until after Sofia died.”
He reached into the leather bag beside Leo’s chair.
Not a gun.
Not cash.
A clear plastic sleeve.
Inside was another photograph.
This one was recent.
My mother stood outside a diner.
Older.
More tired.
Wearing the navy wool coat I had bought her three Christmases earlier.
Beside her stood a beautiful dark-haired woman around my age.
Sofia.
I knew immediately.
She had Dante’s eyes.
And mine.
Not exactly.
Enough.
Same dark eyebrows.
Same uneven smile.
Same slight crease in the chin.
I hated how quickly I saw it.
“When was this taken?”
“Nine months ago.”
“One month before Sofia died.”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Cambridge.”
“Who took it?”
“A parking camera across the street. One of my people found it while reconstructing Sofia’s movements.”
I stared at my mother.
“Why would she meet Sofia and not tell me?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Did Sofia know about me?”
Dante did not answer immediately.
Then he opened the sleeve and turned the photograph over.
There was writing on the back.
My mother’s handwriting.
I would have recognized it in a grocery list from across a room.
Three lines.
Sofia—
She deserves the truth, but not until I know she’s safe.
Please don’t tell Dante yet.
My vision blurred.
I looked up.
Dante looked wounded.
“You saw this?”
“Two months after Sofia died.”
“And you still didn’t come find me?”
“I didn’t know who ‘she’ was.”
“There’s more.”
“Yes.”
He reached into the sleeve again.
A torn corner of paper.
Only five words were visible.
Find Lena at Aurelia.
My chair scraped backward.
“She wrote my workplace.”
Dante nodded.
“Then she wanted you to find me.”
“Eventually.”
“But she vanished.”
“Yes.”
I walked three steps away, then came back because I had nowhere to go.
“This is insane.”
“I agree.”
“Don’t agree with me.”
Leo started bouncing in Dante’s arms.
I looked at his necklace.
The matching blue star.
“Where did Sofia get hers?”
“My mother.”
“Your mother?”
“She had two made after you were born.”
My head snapped up.
“Two?”
“One for you.”
He touched Leo’s pendant.
“One she kept after you disappeared.”
“And Sofia got it later.”
“When she turned sixteen.”
I almost laughed again.
“So your mother believed I was dead too?”
Dante looked away.
“I believed she did.”
That sentence mattered.
I heard it.
“You’re not sure.”
“No.”
“Is she alive?”
“She died twelve years ago.”
“Convenient again.”
This time Dante almost smiled, but grief stopped it.
“She would have liked you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“No.”
He looked at my apron, my pen, the order pad still stuck in my pocket.
“I know you told a man everyone in this restaurant is terrified of that you needed your tips.”
My eyes burned.
I hated that.
I hated the tiny warmth the remark caused.
I wanted everything about him to be simple.
It wasn’t.
Mr. Carrillo appeared twenty feet away, pretending to organize menus.
I lowered my voice.
“If Marisol knew Sofia, and Sofia knew about me, then somebody else might know too.”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
Dante became very still.
“That is the question keeping Leo surrounded by armed men.”
My stomach tightened.
“You think Sofia’s accident wasn’t an accident.”
“I think my daughter discovered something before she died.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“You expect me to trust that?”
“No.”
He lifted the recent photograph again.
“But there’s something else you should see.”
He slid it toward me.
I looked at the image more closely.
My mother.
Sofia.
The diner.
Cars.
Then I noticed the reflection in the diner window behind them.
A man standing beside a black sedan.
Older.
Broad-shouldered.
Watching.
A dragon tattoo showed beneath his cuff.
I looked at Dante.
“Who is he?”
Dante’s face changed.
For the first time that night, the fear was not about me.
“My uncle Carlo.”
I swallowed.
“The one who told you my mother and I died?”
“Yes.”
I looked again.
Carlo had been watching my mother nine months ago.
Three decades after telling Dante she was dead.
Dante turned the photograph over one final time.
There was a fourth line written beneath the others.
I had not seen it because his thumb had covered it.
May you like
My mother had written:
If Carlo sees us together, everything starts again.
