“Say it.”
“I understand.” My voice sounds hollow and colorless.
“Good girl.” Dad pats my cheek. “Make me proud, Adora. Do it for your family.”
He leaves, closing the door behind him.
I stand there for a long time, staring at nothing. Eventually, my legs give out, and I sink back down to the floor. I begin gathering the photograph pieces with trembling fingers. I try to fit them together, but there are too many pieces. I can’t remember who goes where. I can’t even remember what the whole picture looked like anymore.
If I manage to put all the pieces back together, I won’t recognize the girl in the photograph with her beautiful, hopeful smile.
A sob builds inside me, but I’m too desolate to let it out. So I just sit there in the dark, surrounded by broken glass and broken memories, holding poison in one hand and pieces of my mother in the other.
6
Vincenzo
The Vici house is always too quiet now.
I stand in the doorway of Valentina’s room, my hand gripping the frame. It looks exactly as my sister left it seven weeks ago, the bed neatly made with a pale purple comforter, textbooks stacked on the desk, and a half-finished sketch of a raven pinned to the corkboard above her dresser. She was learning to draw our family symbol. She never got to finish it.
I can’t make myself cross the threshold. Can’t disturb the careful arrangement of her things, because that will destroy the illusion that she might walk through the door at any moment.
The door to Marco’s room is closed. I haven’t opened it since the funeral. My parents’ room at the end of the hall is the same, untouched and frozen in time. The entire house is a mausoleum, every room a shrine to the dead.
Thank God for Aunt Sofia.
She moved in three days after the massacre, showing up with two suitcases and a fierce determination not to let me drown alone in this grief. She didn’t ask permission. Just arrived, claimed a guest room, and started making sure I ate, slept, and didn’t completely lose my mind. Without her, I think I would have. This house is too big and too empty, and the silence would have swallowed me whole.
I force myself to turn away from Valentina’s room and walk down the hallway. My boots thud heavily on the hardwood floors, each step echoing through the empty space. Moonlight streams through the tall windows, casting long shadows that make the house feel even more hollow.
Downstairs, a light is on in the kitchen.
Of course it is. Sofia never sleeps when she knows I’m out. She’ll be sitting at the kitchen table, probably with a book she’s not really reading, waiting to make sure I come home alive. I should feel guilty for worrying her, but instead, I feel like my skin is on fire. Something is crawling beneath my flesh, trying to claw its way out. Rage and guilt are all tangled together, and they’re choking me.
I destroyed Adora’s photograph.
The realization hits me again, fresh and sickening. I ripped apart a picture of her family. Her dead mother. Tore it into pieces while she screamed and begged me to stop. I didn’t realize what I was doing until it was too late. I watched the light die in Adora’s eyes as the fragments fell like snow around her.
Your mother raised you better than this.
I can already hear Sofia saying it, her voice full of disappointment. And she’d be right. Mom would be ashamed of what I did tonight.
But Mom is dead, because Adora Montoni led her into a trap.
I push open the kitchen door, and sure enough, Sofia is there. She’s not at the table, though. She’s at the stove, her back to me,stirring something in a small pot. The scent of warm milk and honey fills the air. It’s a drink she used to make for me and her sons when we were children and couldn’t sleep. It smells like home and every warm memory I’ll never experience again.
“Sit,” she says with a glance over her shoulder. “You look like you’re about to collapse.”
I sink into a chair at the kitchen table, the same table where my family used to gather. Marco would steal food off Valentina’s plate. Dad would read the newspaper. Mom would pour coffee and plan her day.
Now there’s just me. And Sofia, who’s trying so hard to fill the void even though she’s drowning in her own grief. Dante was her son. Dad was her brother. She held tight to her younger son Matteo’s hand at the funeral, her face a mask of devastation that I’ll never forget.
It’s my family’s fault her eldest child is dead, yet here she is, taking care of me. Making sure I don’t destroy myself along with everyone else. I don’t know how she wakes up every morning in this house of ghosts and chooses love.
Sometimes I catch her standing in bedroom doorways, just like I stand in Valentina’s. She never goes in either. Never disturbs their things, as if they might need them when they come home.
“I heard you come in twenty minutes ago,” Sofia continues. “You’ve been standing in the hallway ever since. In front of Valentina’s room?”
