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“I called the company after your mother died. They told me that they had never owned a car like that.”

My grandmother stood and carried an old box from the sideboard. The cardboard lid had softened at the corners, and a faded florist’s logo remained visible beneath years of tape. She opened it between us. After digging through it, Nonna found a photograph taken less than a month before my mother’s murder. She handed it to me, and I gazed down at it.

My mother stood behind me on the front steps of the Brooklyn house, one hand on my shoulder. I wore my school uniform beneath an unbuttoned winter coat, my expression conveying all the suffering of a teenager forced to pose for her grandmother. My mother wore the red scarf I remembered from her last night. My thumb moved over the edge of the photograph.

“What happened after she came home from work the day she died?”

“She argued with your father on the telephone,” Nonno answered. “She kept saying watching the house was not enough. She wanted to know who had been asking about you. That was also the day that she told you not to leave the house,” Nonna said.

I remembered that part.

I had planned to meet up with friends that night. Nothing crazy or dramatic. I was going to get pizza with two boys from school and a girl whose parents believed we were studying at the library. My mother told me I had to stay home, and I accused her of treating me like a child. She checked the deadbolt, pulled the curtain across the front window, and told me I could hate her after she returned from the pharmacy.

“I told her that I already did,” I whispered, my own shame making my voice shake.

Nonna reached across the table, taking my hand in hers.

“You were only fifteen, child.”

“It was the last thing I said to her,” I replied sadly.

“No.” My grandmother’s voice became unexpectedly firm. “The last thing you said to her was that she had better bring home the lemon cookies you liked if you had to stay home. You shouted it from the stairs when she opened the door.”

The memory returned with painful clarity. My mother turning back, one hand on the doorknob. The red scarf around her throat. Her tired smile.

The powdered ones?

Obviously.

Then she left to buy toothpaste, Tylenol for Nonno’s knee, and the cheap lemon cookies I’d asked her for.

Twenty-three minutes later, someone forced her car into a narrow street two blocks from the pharmacy.

Thirty minutes later, she was dead.

* * *

Two hours after leaving Nonna and Nonno’s, Sergei and I sat inside Ivan and Kit’s security lab while the last night of my mother’s life filled three screens.

Kit sat at the central station, her dark hair twisted into a knot with a pencil shoved through it. Ivan stood behind her with his glasses low on his nose, his eyes flicking between files.

“We’re going to keep this simple,” Kit said. “The police didn’t look into anything beyond that one night. Bellandi security documented the week around it. Neither group had the names we’ve got now, though.”

She pulled up an image of the dark green sedan that had appeared outside my school nine days before my mother called Raffaele. Kit moved through another photograph, then another: the same sedan near my mother’s office. A man photographing the Caruso house from inside a coffee shop. A white cargo van passing my school twice in one afternoon.

“Your father’s security response made their job easier,” Kit said. “The Bellandi cars confirmed where you were, what house you lived in, your school, everything.”

We watched footage of my mother leaving the pharmacy carrying a white plastic bag. The camera caught the red scarf, the navy coat, and the impatient way she tucked her hair behind one ear before unlocking the car.

Five minutes later, a white van followed her through the intersection. The green sedan took the next turn. Then, a black car appeared behind both.

The footage changed to a private camera mounted above a dry cleaner. My mother’s car entered the side street. The van accelerated past and stopped across the road in front of her while the green sedan closed in from behind.

Two men got out.

One struck the driver’s side window of my mother’s car with something heavy enough to collapse the glass inward. She hit the gas and reversed hard into the sedan behind her, then opened the door into the first man’s body when he reached inside, trying to grab her. I watched as she clawed at one man’s face and kicked another. Reaching beneath the seat, she came up with the metal club Nonno kept there. She swung it once, sending a man stumbling into the van.

“She knew they wanted you,” Sergei said beside me. His voice was quiet.