Chapter 3
The physician found it on the left femur, a surgical plate with a serial number etched into the steel.
Luca sent the number through private medical channels while Damian stood in the rain between the graves, feeling the ground of his life excavated along with them. Forty minutes later, the answer came.
Peter D’Amico. A boat mechanic who had worked for Anthony and supposedly resigned two days before the heart attack, then left Pennsylvania for good.
A dead mechanic had been buried under his father’s name.
The question had stopped being whether the story was false. It was now who had been powerful enough to swap two bodies, falsify the records, and control a funeral while a seventeen-year-old boy watched.
Luca’s phone rang as they resealed the graves. He listened and went still, the way people did when they handed over something that might explode.
“Robert’s truck was found near Blackstone Lake. Driver’s door open. Blood on the wheel.” He lowered the phone. “Robert’s gone.”
Blackstone Lake lay fourteen miles beyond the estate, joined to it by an old service road that had once belonged to Anthony. Damian knew without being told that the boathouse opened onto the same water through a narrow canal.
“Get the helicopter.”
“Wait.” Luca looked at his phone again. “Claire Bennett’s phone pinged once near the lake at 9:40 this morning. Then it went dark.”
Damian thought of Mia sleeping against his heart, warm and unbothered, while her mother disappeared into the same water where his father was supposed to have died. Claire had known enough to put her child in his path before she walked toward the danger herself.
—
He found Mia on the library floor building a tower out of wooden blocks. Mr. Bunny sat beside her like an exhausted accomplice.
“Did you find Mommy?”
Damian knelt. There was no practiced version of this. “Not yet. But I’m going to keep looking until I do.”
She studied him gravely. Then she reached up and touched the crease between his eyebrows with one finger.
“Sad face again.”
Damian almost smiled. No one had spoken to him that way in decades and stayed comfortable enough to poke him afterward.
Mia leaned closer, lowering her voice as if the bunny might overhear. “Mommy said you might look scary. But Daddy Anthony said you were good.”
Everything inside him stopped.
“What did you call him?”
“Daddy Anthony.” She hugged the rabbit. “Mommy talks to him sometimes.”
Anthony Romano had been dead for twenty-two years. Claire had been a child when he died. She should have known him only as a name in a newspaper archive. Yet Mia said it with no hesitation, the way she said *milk* and *bunny*.
He asked where Mommy talked to him. Mia shook her head and said she could only tell if Mommy didn’t come back before dark.
Damian looked at the window. The grandfather clock behind him read 5:46. The rain had thickened. Sunset was less than an hour away.
For the first time he allowed himself a possibility more terrifying than an empty coffin. Anthony Romano might be alive.
—
At 6:19, Mia climbed into his lap and asked for Mr. Bunny. She turned the toy upside down and opened a seam he had assumed was just torn. A second strip of paper slid into her palm, and she handed it to him the way she’d hand over a crayon.
He knew Claire’s handwriting from the laundry roster. He read the note twice.
**WHEN THE WEST CLOCK STRIKES SEVEN, FOLLOW THE BOAT THAT HAS NO NAME. COME ALONE OR ANTHONY DIES FOR REAL THIS TIME.**
Thunder rolled over the estate. Behind him the door opened, and Luca stepped in asking what he was holding.
Damian folded the paper before he knew he’d decided to. His thumb pressed the crease flat.
“Nothing important.”
It was the first time in eleven years that he had lied directly to Luca’s face. Luca’s eyes narrowed. It lasted a second. Then he nodded once and left.
The door clicked. Mia watched it close.
“Mommy said don’t tell Mr. Luca.”
Damian’s blood cooled. “Why not?”
She leaned in until her forehead nearly touched his. “Because his daddy was there too.”
“Where, Mia?”
She pointed across the room at the desk, where the photograph lay in the green lamplight.
May you like
Damian crossed to it and looked again. Anthony, laughing. Robert Hale, young. Sebastian, his face scratched white. And the third man, with the heavy hand on Anthony’s shoulder. The one who had died of cancer fifteen years ago.
He had taught Damian to shoot before either boy could drive. He had taught his own son the same lessons on the same range.
