Chapter 4 - Forty-One Seconds
The hardest part wasn't learning I had a son.
It was learning how desperately I had fought to bring him into the world.
Luca gave me Sofia's journals.
He didn't read them to me.
“They're yours,” he said.
I opened the first one alone.
Week 12.
We almost lost Peanut tonight.
Peanut.
I laughed through tears.
Leo had been Peanut.
The journal told a story Luca hadn't been able to.
A pregnancy filled with fear.
Sofia had wanted a child desperately.
After an earlier miscarriage, she had been terrified to hope again.
Every ultrasound became a negotiation with God.
At eighteen weeks, she'd first felt Leo move while Luca was arguing on the phone.
She'd grabbed his wrist and pressed it to her stomach.
He stopped speaking midsentence.
At twenty-three weeks, they learned it was a boy.
Luca bought six pairs of shoes.
Sofia wrote:
He cannot walk, but apparently our fetus needs Italian loafers.
I laughed so hard I cried.
Then came week twenty-eight.
Hospitalization.
Medication.
Steroid injections for Leo's lungs.
Sofia wrote about the loneliness of pregnancy complications.
Everyone congratulated her.
Few understood she was frightened every morning.
At thirty-three weeks and two days, her water broke.
There was a placental abruption.
Blood.
Emergency surgery.
That explained my flashes.
I turned the page.
The handwriting changed.
Luca's.
Sofia couldn't write tonight. Leo was born at 2:46 a.m. He weighs three pounds, nine ounces.
Then:
He didn't breathe for forty-one seconds.
I pressed the journal against my chest.
I suddenly remembered screaming.
Not from pain.
From silence.
“Why isn't he crying?”
Doctors moving.
Luca beside my head.
“Why isn't he crying?”
Then—
A tiny sound.
Weak.
Angry.
Beautiful.
I collapsed over the journal.
Memory rushed through me.
The operating room.
Luca's forehead against mine.
My son crying.
Someone saying, “He's breathing.”
I remembered Luca sobbing.
The feared Luca Moretti had sobbed like a child.
I found him downstairs.
He was standing by a window.
“Forty-one seconds.”
He turned.
“What?”
“I remember.”
His face emptied.
“I remember waiting for him to cry.”
He crossed half the room before stopping himself.
That hesitation destroyed me.
I stepped forward.
He didn't.
So I closed the distance.
I hugged him.
His arms remained at his sides for one second.
Then they wrapped around me.
Hard.
His breath broke against my hair.
“Sofia.”
I closed my eyes.
Nothing romantic happened.
No miraculous flood of memories.
Just grief.
Two people mourning the same year from opposite sides.
Later, he showed me videos.
Leo in the NICU.
Me sitting beside him.
Luca changing a diaper with absolute terror.
Me laughing.
Leo finally coming home after thirty-six days.
Then the final video.
It had been recorded three days before I disappeared.
I was standing in the nursery.
“Say hi to Daddy.”
Leo was seven weeks old.
Tiny.
I kissed his forehead.
Then I looked directly into the camera.
“If you're watching this at your meeting, Luca Moretti, your son and I officially vote that you come home.”
Luca stopped the video.
“That's enough.”
“Why?”
“Because three days later you disappeared.”
Now I needed the truth.
“All of it.”
He sat across from me.
That morning, Sofia had taken Leo to a pediatric appointment.
Her car was later discovered wrecked beside the Schuylkill River.
Blood inside.
No Sofia.
No Leo.
Luca went insane looking for them.
Twelve hours later, Leo appeared at a church wrapped in a hospital blanket.
A note was pinned to him.
THE MOTHER IS DEAD. THE DEBT IS PAID.
Luca searched anyway.
Divers.
Private investigators.
Hospitals.
Morgues.
Every camera between Philadelphia and New Jersey.
Nothing.
Then three months later, someone sent him photographs supposedly showing Sofia's body after an unidentified woman had been recovered downstream.
The identification had been manipulated.
Luca believed it.
Eventually.
“Who wanted me dead?”
“I have enemies.”
“That's not an answer.”
“No.”
His eyes hardened.
“It's the only answer I had.”
I studied him.
“What if this wasn't about you?”
He went still.
“What?”
“What if someone didn't take me because I was Luca Moretti's wife?”
My pulse accelerated.
“What if they took me because of something I knew?”
At that moment, a memory struck.
A parking garage.
A woman screaming.
A familiar male voice.
Then my own hand hiding something inside Leo's diaper bag.
I grabbed the table.
“Sofia?”
“I hid something.”
“Where?”
“I don't know.”
Then I remembered one more detail.
A gold ring.
A black stone.
May you like
I looked at Luca.
“One of the men who took me wore your family crest.”
