My sister.
Alive.
I could not speak.
She looked at me and began to cry.
“Sarah,” she whispered.
Something inside me tore cleanly in two.
I wanted to run to her.
I wanted to strike her.
I wanted to be ten years old again, hiding under blankets during thunderstorms while she curled beside me and asked if I thought heaven had windows.
“You were alive,” I said.
She nodded.
“All this time?”
“I was never far.”
The words made no sense until she reached into her coat and pulled out a small photograph.
Lena and Ash on the bakery curb with ice cream.
The same photograph Luca had received.
“I sent it,” she said.
Luca turned sharply.
Vanessa flinched. “I had to. Enzo found Gray Hollow. He found them. I knew Luca could protect them better than I could.”
My voice shook. “You watched us?”
“From a distance.”
“For three years?”
“Yes.”
Rage rose, hot and wild.
“You let me believe you had tried to kill me.”
“I thought hatred would keep you away from Chicago.” She pressed a hand to her mouth. “I thought if you hated me enough, you would never look back.”
Enzo tapped his cane once against the stone floor.
“How touching. Sisters reunited in mutual stupidity.”
Luca moved so fast I barely saw it. One moment he stood beside me; the next he had Enzo by the throat against a pillar.
Matteo drew a gun.
I stepped between him and Luca before thinking.
“Shoot me,” I said.
Everyone froze.
My heart pounded so hard I thought it might crack my ribs.
Matteo’s smile faded.
“You think I won’t?”
“I think you enjoy mirrors too much to break the only person here who sees you clearly.”
His eyes narrowed.
“You don’t know me.”
“I know men like you. You were hurt, so you made injury your religion. You were abandoned, so you decided love was a room only fools entered unarmed. You call Luca brother because you need him to be responsible for what was done to you.”
Matteo’s hand tightened on the gun.
“He had everything.”
“No,” I said. “He had what you were taught to want.”
Silence.
Then Vanessa spoke.
“Matteo, please.”
His eyes flicked toward her. There it was. The weakness. Not love, exactly, but the memory of having once wanted to be loved.
Enzo saw it too.
“You pathetic boy,” he hissed. “Still listening to the wrong woman.”
Matteo turned.
That was all Luca needed.
The gunshot cracked through the chapel.
Birds exploded from the roof.
For one terrifying second, I thought Luca had been hit.
Then Enzo looked down at his own chest, surprised, almost offended by the spreading red beneath his coat.
Matteo stood with the gun in his hand, face blank.
Enzo slid down the pillar.
“You fool,” he whispered.
Matteo stared at him. “You said my mother died.”
Enzo coughed.
Vanessa whispered, “She didn’t.”
The air changed.
Luca turned slowly.
“What?”
Vanessa was shaking now.
“The proof,” she said. “Where his mother sang to him.”
She moved to the old organ in the corner of the chapel. Beneath it, one floorboard sat slightly raised. Luca knelt and pried it loose.
Inside was a metal box.
He opened it.
Letters. Photographs. A birth certificate. A hospital bracelet. A cassette tape labeled with a woman’s name.