Chapter 6
Sofia died in a car accident.
I had accepted that.
Until that night.
The drive contained no accusation of murder.
That mattered.
Her final recording was made three weeks before she died.
She described one specific incident.
A black SUV followed her on the mountain road outside our Vermont house.
Too close.
Aggressive.
She called Rafe.
The SUV disappeared.
We never identified the driver.
Her car crashed on that same road twenty days later during freezing rain.
No second vehicle found.
No evidence anyone struck her.
For five years I forced myself to accept accident because inventing an enemy would not bring my wife back.
Now Marco looked sick.
I knew.
“What?”
He whispered:
“The SUV.”
My entire body became still.
Camilla started shaking her head.
“No.”
I looked at Marco.
“Who?”
“One of Vittorio’s old drivers.”
Rafe cursed.
Marco continued quickly.
“He was supposed to scare her.”
There.
The sentence people use when consequence becomes larger than intention.
“Why?”
“So she would stop pushing you to move the family.”
Sofia wanted us away from the main Valenti estate.
She thought Livia should grow up somewhere quieter.
I agreed.
The Second Table saw that as disaster.
Distance weakened their influence.
So they staged threats to make the estate feel necessary.
The black SUV was one.
“Was he there when she crashed?”
Marco shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
Not good enough.
Camilla whispered:
“He wasn’t.”
We both looked at her.
“How do you know?”
She started crying.
Because after the accident, she contacted the driver.
He said he had followed Sofia earlier that month.
Not that night.
He swore he had been in New York.
Could be true.
Could be another lie.
But Sofia’s crash likely remained exactly what I had believed for five years.
An accident.
The terror surrounding it was not.
The Second Table did not kill my wife.
They created a world where she was frightened before she died.
Then hid that from me.
Explanation.
Not excuse.
I looked at Marco.
“You let me mourn inside a lie.”
May you like
He said nothing.
That was the moment I stopped thinking of him as family leadership at all.
