Chapter 16 - LUCA’S RESTAURANTThe restaurant still existed.
Different name.
Different owner.
Same building.
Clara came with me.
Lily insisted.
“You’re not investigating your brother alone.”
“I am capable.”
“That’s precisely why you’re not.”
We traveled to the coast.
The current owner knew nothing about Luca.
But the previous owner did.
Her name was Sofia Moretti.
Eighty-one years old.
Living in assisted care three miles away.
When I entered her room, she looked at me and began crying.
“You have his eyes.”
I could not speak.
“You’re Alessandro.”
“Yes.”
She reached for my hand.
“I wondered if you’d ever come.”
“Who were you to Luca?”
Her answer dismantled a piece of my brother I had never known.
“I was going to marry him.”
Luca had planned to leave.
Not eventually.
That week.
The restaurant was supposed to be theirs.
He had purchased a ring.
He had arranged money.
He had even spoken to a lawyer about testifying against men inside our family.
Then he learned I was being sent to the warehouse.
He went back.
For me.
Sofia never saw him alive again.
“Why didn’t you contact me?”
“Your father visited me after the funeral.”
My jaw tightened.
“He told me Luca had changed his mind.”
She smiled sadly.
“I knew he was lying.”
“Why stay silent?”
“Because I was pregnant.”
The room disappeared.
Clara grabbed my arm.
I stared at Sofia.
“What?”
“I lost the baby at five months.”
Pain arrived.
Then vanished into something quieter.
No secret Romano heir.
No convenient surviving bloodline.
Just another life our world had destroyed.
Sofia opened a drawer.
Inside was a notebook.
Luca’s.
“He wrote about you.”
I could barely touch it.
One passage had been underlined.
If I ever get out, I want to build places where frightened people can disappear from danger without disappearing from life.
Lily’s mysterious sentence had not come from Luca.
It had come from his notebook.
May you like
Someone had read it.
Someone connected to Harbor Light.
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