Chapter 1
The black drive rested in my palm while water dripped from Sophie’s torn cloth doll onto the stone terrace.
A minute earlier, Bianca had been smiling while my daughter cried. Now the smile was gone. She was staring at the drive with a kind of fear I had almost never seen on my sister’s face. Marco looked at her instead of at me, and that was enough to tell me the truth was not in his mouth. It was in my hand.
“You never hated that doll,” I said. “You were terrified of what my wife sewed inside it.”
Bianca laughed too quickly and told me Elena had been unstable near the end. Marco said it was probably an old keepsake, nothing more. Neither of them asked what was written on the folded note lying beside the drive.
That told me they already knew.
I crouched and picked up the note. The paper had been protected inside thin plastic. I knew the handwriting before I even unfolded it. Elena. For one second, the whole terrace disappeared. The pool, the guests, Bianca, Marco, all of it went distant.
If you are reading this, Sophie’s doll finally opened.
Do not let Bianca destroy the drive.
My fingers tightened. Bianca took a step backward. Rafael Costa moved behind her without being told.
The note continued.
Marco knows what happened at Villa Aurelia. Bianca knows why I went there. Neither of them knows I recorded the room.
I lifted my eyes slowly. Marco had gone pale.
Rafael brought me an isolated laptop. I inserted the drive myself. One folder appeared on the screen. FOR MASSIMO.
Inside it were twelve recordings. I opened the first.
Elena appeared on the screen alive, tired, but steady. Then she looked directly into the camera and said, “If Bianca tells Massimo my death was an accident, she’s lying.”
Something inside me went completely still.
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Sophie was clutching the soaked doll a few feet away, staring at the torn seam her mother had repaired long ago. Bianca was no longer angry. She looked hunted.
And in that moment, before the second recording even began, I knew the day Elena died was about to change forever.
