Luca picked up the photograph. His thumb brushed over his brother’s smiling face, and for a second, the head of the Moretti family looked twenty years older.
“She loved him,” Luca whispered, his voice breaking slightly. “God forgive me, Marco told me she loved him, and I didn’t believe him until right now.”
Then I noticed something else at the bottom of the tin box.
“Mr. Moretti, look,” I said, reaching down to pick up a small, folded square of heavy cream stationery.
It had the silver crest of the Bellini Shipping Corporation embossed at the top.
I unfolded it. Inside wasn’t a letter. It was a child’s crayon drawing on the back of an accounting ledger page—two stick figures holding hands beside a blue lake, and in the corner, written in neat, trembling adult handwriting, was a single sentence:
If they find out he is Marco’s son, Richard will kill us both.
I looked up at Luca, my breath catching in my throat.
May you like
Before Luca could speak, the heavy fire door at the end of the third-floor corridor slammed shut, followed by the unmistakable metallic click of a deadbolt locking from the outside.
Then came the smell of smoke.
