Chapter 1 - THE TAG ON THE SUITCASE
Giovanni Moretti had been standing beside his wife's coffin for three hours when the chapel doors opened.
Every head turned.
Emilio and Clarissa walked in carrying matching black suitcases, sunburned, exhausted, and still wearing airport clothes.
Their mother, Elena, lay ten feet away under white roses.
Neither child looked at the coffin first.
They looked at their father.
Giovanni's grief hardened into something colder.
"Where were you?"
Emilio lowered his suitcase behind his leg.
"Dad, I can explain."
Giovanni crossed the aisle and struck him once across the face before two guards stepped between them.
Clarissa gasped and grabbed her brother's arm.
"You disappeared while your mother was dying."
Emilio said nothing.
Then Giovanni saw the airline tag hanging from the suitcase handle.
CAYO LUCERO.
His anger vanished.
Elena had flown to that private island six weeks earlier and made him promise never to mention it to anyone.
Now both of his children had returned from the same place on the day of her funeral.
Giovanni reached for the suitcase.
Emilio pulled it back.
"Don't open it here."
That sentence made the room colder.
Giovanni took the bag anyway and unzipped it beside the coffin.
Under wet clothes and beach towels was a small blue music box with a broken silver latch.
Giovanni stopped breathing.
He had buried that music box with Elena's mother twenty-two years ago.
Clarissa's hands tightened around the suitcase handle until her knuckles turned white.
Giovanni had seen fear in his children before, but never fear of something their mother had deliberately left behind.
Emilio glanced toward the closed chapel doors as if he expected someone to walk in and stop them from opening the bag.
That frightened Giovanni more than the insult of their late arrival.
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And taped beneath it was a note in Elena's handwriting.
"If Giovanni sees this, then I did not die the way they told him."
