Chapter 6
Raffaele did not sleep.
The sentence followed him through every room.
The wrong person died.
By morning, Teresa found him sitting alone at the kitchen table.
Lucy was still asleep upstairs.
“Tell me.”
He did.
Teresa’s face emptied.
Then she stood.
“Anna warned you.”
Raffaele looked up.
“What?”
“She warned you about Marcus.”
“When?”
“Before she died.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
Teresa’s voice sharpened.
“She told you he was making too many decisions without showing you paperwork.”
Raffaele remembered an argument.
Anna at the end of the dining table.
Marcus leaving early.
Raffaele irritated because she had questioned him in front of other people.
He had told Anna:
Marcus has been with me twelve years. Stop treating everybody like they’re trying to steal from us.
He had forgotten the exact words.
Teresa had not.
“You embarrassed her,” Teresa said.
Raffaele looked away.
“So she started investigating alone.”
He could not deny it.
His habit had been simple.
Loyal men received trust.
People who questioned loyal men created problems.
Marcus had understood that system better than Anna did.
Raffaele had built the blind spot Marcus needed.
Upstairs, Lucy called for him.
The conversation ended.
Raffaele went immediately.
Lucy sat in bed holding Anna’s photograph.
“Is Mommy coming?”
He sat beside her.
“No, sweetheart.”
“But Celeste said—”
“Celeste said something she shouldn’t have.”
Lucy looked at the picture.
“Mommy’s still dead?”
“Yes.”
Raffaele hated the word.
Lucy leaned against him.
“Did somebody hurt her?”
He could have lied.
Instead:
“I’m trying to find out.”
Lucy became quiet.
Then she said something he had not expected.
“Uncle Marcus said Daddy was supposed to—”
She stopped.
“Supposed to what?”
Lucy frowned, struggling with a sentence meant for adults.
“Be in the black car.”
Raffaele felt his body go still.
“When did he say that?”
“At the pool.”
“Who was he talking to?”
“Celeste.”
Teresa stood in the doorway behind him.
Raffaele looked toward her.
The wrong person died.
Daddy was supposed to be in the black car.
May you like
For the first time, the possibility in front of him was worse than the one he had been investigating.
Anna might not have been Marcus’s intended victim.
