THE INK ON THE RECEIPT WAS STILL FRESH

I stared at the wooden beads resting in my palm.

S.E.R.

Sarah Elizabeth Reed.

My mother had held this exact rosary every night during her brutal battle with cancer when I was seven. I vividly remembered the night she passed away in the hospice ward. My father had placed this rosary in her hands in the casket.

It was buried with her.

Or so I thought.

My hands began to shake. I ran up the stairs from the basement, clutching the beads so tightly they dug into my skin.

I found Luca in the library, pouring over legal documents with his lawyer, transferring the estate out of the syndicate’s shadow.

“Luca,” I interrupted, my voice trembling.

He looked up, immediately seeing the panic in my eyes. He dismissed the lawyer with a wave of his hand.

“What is it?” he asked, crossing the room to me.

I held out the rosary.

“This was in Vanessa’s purse. It was my mother’s.”

Luca frowned, taking the wooden beads. He examined the initials. “Are you sure?”

“I’m positive. But Luca, it was buried with her twenty years ago. How did Vanessa get it?”

Luca’s expression darkened. He walked over to his desk and picked up the phone.

“Marco,” Luca said into the receiver. “Where did they process Vanessa?”

A pause.

“Get the car ready. We’re going to the federal holding facility.”

An hour later, we sat in a sterile, gray interrogation room in the downtown FBI building. Luca’s uncle, a high-ranking federal judge, had pulled enough strings to give us five minutes alone with her.

The heavy metal door clanked open.

Vanessa was escorted in, wearing a bright orange jumpsuit, her wrists handcuffed to a waist chain. She looked exhausted, her face stripped of makeup and arrogance.

She sat across from us, offering a weak, bitter smile.

“Come to gloat, Luca?” she rasped.

Luca didn’t speak. He tossed the wooden rosary onto the metal table.

Vanessa’s eyes dropped to the beads. She flinched.

“Where did you get that?” I demanded, leaning forward.

Vanessa looked at me, a strange mix of pity and malice in her eyes.

“I found it,” she said quietly.

“Where?”

“In your father’s house,” Vanessa said. “Two years ago. The night I poisoned him.”

I felt a cold chill run down my spine. “Why were you looking through my mother’s things?”

Vanessa let out a dry, humorless laugh.

“I wasn’t looking for your mother’s things, Emma. I was looking for the ledger. Your father’s office was a mess. But in his bottom desk drawer, hidden in a locked metal box, I found that rosary.”

“That’s impossible,” I said, shaking my head. “It was buried with her.”

“Was it?” Vanessa tilted her head, her eyes gleaming with a toxic secret. “Tell me, Emma. When your mother died, did you see the body in the casket?”

My breath caught. “It was a closed casket. My dad said the illness had taken a toll on her appearance. He wanted me to remember her as she was.”

Vanessa smiled. It was an ugly, triumphant smile.

“Your father lied to you, Emma.”

Luca slammed his hands on the table, startling her. “Stop playing games, Vanessa. What do you know?”

“I know that Sarah Reed didn’t die of cancer twenty years ago,” Vanessa spat. “I took that rosary because it was wrapped around a letter. A letter your father wrote to her, Emma. Dated five years after her supposed funeral.”

The room spun.

“You’re lying,” I whispered.

“Why would I lie now? I have nothing left!” Vanessa shot back. “Your father helped Antonio Moretti hide a billion dollars. Do you really think the Bellinis just let him live a quiet suburban life? My father put a hit out on your mother twenty years ago to force Thomas into compliance. Thomas faked her death to protect her. He sent her away.”

“Where is the letter?” Luca demanded.

“I burned it,” Vanessa smiled vindictively. “But I memorized the address on the envelope. She was hiding in a small town in Michigan. St. Joseph. Under the name Sarah Evans.”

The FBI guard knocked on the door. “Time’s up.”

Vanessa stood up, the chains rattling around her waist.

She looked down at me one last time.

“Your father is a brilliant man, Emma. But he built your entire life on a lie. Have fun living with it.”

She was led out of the room.

I sat completely frozen in the metal chair, staring at the wooden rosary on the table.

My mother was alive.

For twenty years, I had mourned a woman who was living a few hours away. My father had watched me cry over a grave filled with nothing but rocks and dirt.

Luca knelt beside my chair, taking my cold hands in his.

“Emma,” he said softly.

“He lied to me,” I choked out, tears spilling down my cheeks. “My whole life, Luca. I gave up college. I scrubbed floors. I bathed him. And he lied to me.”

“He did it to keep you both alive,” Luca reasoned gently. “If the Bellinis knew she was alive, they would have used her to get to the vault.”

“I need to ask him,” I said, standing up abruptly. “I need to hear it from him.”

We drove back to the mansion in agonizing silence.

I stormed through the front doors and ran straight to the guest suite where we had set up my father’s medical bed.

I burst into the room.

“Dad!” I yelled.

The private nurse looked up from the corner, startled.

But my father didn’t look at me.

He was lying perfectly still on the bed. His eyes were closed.

The heart monitor beside him was emitting a long, continuous tone.