And if I told her about Rosaria—still here, still critical, still hadn’t said a kind word about her daughter—I’d have to watch Paula’s face crack open. She’d grieved the relationship they never fixed. That would be cruel in a way I wasn’t willing to be.
“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about it, would you?” Paula looked at me hopefully. Almosttoohopefully.
“I didn’t know about the diary,” I said. “But you’re right—it’s strange no one’s found it.”
Paula studied me. I held her gaze.
“Be careful, Gina. This family has more buried than Rosaria.”
She finished her wine, hugged me at the door—hard, genuine, the kind that made me feel guilty for not trusting her completely—and drove away.
I stood on the porch breathing cold air until my head cleared.
My phone buzzed. Carmen.Just so you know. Josie’s been asking me things. About the divorce. About what it was really like before you left. She won’t ask you — she’s too proud and too scared of Dad — but she’s asking. I think she knows the story she’s been telling herself doesn’t hold up anymore.
I read it twice. Set the phone down. Picked it back up.What about Nick?
Three dots. A long pause. Then:Nick misses you, I can tell. He’ll come around.
Another knock came at seven-fifteen. Boy, I sure was getting popular.
I opened the door expecting Paula again, or maybe Lori. Instead, Detective Tony Caruso was on my porch holding a manila folder.
He looked different outside the station. Still rumpled—coffee stain on his cuff, tie loosened—but the porch light caught the silver at his temples and the lines around his eyes, and I noticed he had the kind of face that got more interesting the longer you looked at it.
I realized I’d been looking for several seconds without speaking.
“Ms. Ferraro.”
“Detective.”
“Can I come in?”
I stepped aside. He ducked through the doorway—unnecessary, standard height frame, but he did it anyway. He glanced around with cop’s eyes: the books, the herbs, the covered mirrors.
“Nice place,” he said, the way people say things they feel obligated to say.
“What’s in the folder?”
He set it on the kitchen table, next to my abandoned soup. His fingers stayed on it for a moment, like he was deciding something. Then he opened it.
“Toxicology came back.”
The kitchen went very still. I gripped the back of a chair.
“I called in a favor with the ME’s office. Got them to pull the original bloodwork and run additional panels.” He slid a sheet toward me—rows of numbers and chemical names I couldn’t parse. “They found traces of a methanol-based compound. Subtle. Easy to miss on a standard tox screen, especially when nobody’s looking.”
“Methanol,” I repeated.
“Industrial. Shows up in solvents, paint strippers, certain adhesives. Hobby supplies. Art materials.” He tapped the paper. “Not hard to get your hands on—hardware store, craft shops, online. You’d need to modify the concentration to make itlethal, though and that takes specialized knowledge. Chemistry or medicine.”
I pulled the chair out and sat down because my legs had made the decision for me. So Rosaria was right.
“Is it conclusive?”
“No.” Tony sat down across from me, the chair creaking under him. “It’s consistent with poisoning, but a defense attorney would argue it could’ve been environmental exposure, accidental ingestion, half a dozen other things. It’s not enough for a case.” He paused. “But it’s not nothing.”
Not nothing. The phrase hung in the air between us.
