Chapter 1
“I never said it was a recording.”
The memory card rested between my fingers.
Dominic stopped breathing.
That reaction told me more than anything the card could contain.
Behind me, Isabella held Lucia against her chest. The little girl was staring at me with enormous dark eyes that looked so much like mine I could barely keep my attention on the man I had trusted with my life for eleven years.
Dominic pushed himself upright beside the overturned pastry cart.
“You’re making assumptions.”
“No.”
I looked down at the card.
“You made one.”
His face tightened.
The café had gone silent except for the soft unraveling of a ribbon spool rolling beneath a table. One half of the torn photograph lay near my shoe. The other rested beside Lucia’s backpack.
I picked them up.
The photograph showed Isabella standing outside a hospital.
Much younger.
Pregnant.
Dominic was beside her.
My hand stopped.
The image had been folded so many times the creases had nearly split her face.
I looked at Isabella.
“What is this?”
Her eyes filled.
Dominic answered first.
“Nothing.”
I turned toward him.
Again.
Wrong person answering.
Isabella held Lucia tighter.
“That was the day he told me you didn’t want us.”
The room changed.
I stared at Dominic.
He laughed bitterly. “She’s lying.”
Lucia flinched at his voice.
I saw it.
So did Isabella.
“She was there,” Isabella said. “He came to the hospital before Lucia was born. He said you knew about the pregnancy.”
I felt something inside me go cold.
“I didn’t.”
“I know that now.”
Dominic shook his head. “Marco, think.”
I almost smiled.
He had spent eleven years telling me when to think.
Where to look.
Who to distrust.
Now the habit sounded different.
I held up the memory card.
“What’s on it?”
He said nothing.
I moved closer.
“You already called it a recording.”
Dominic’s eyes flicked toward Isabella.
There.
Fear.
Not of me.
Of what she had brought back.
Isabella finally spoke.
“I never heard what’s on it.”
I looked at her.
“Then who put it in the photograph?”
She swallowed.
“Your mother.”
My hand tightened around the card.
My mother had been dead for four years.
Dominic went completely still.
May you like
And for the first time since Lucia told me we had the same eyes, I understood this was not only a secret about a daughter I never knew.
Someone had reached from the grave to bring Isabella back to me.
