THE MAFIA BOSS CALLED HIS MAID AGAIN AND AGAIN, BUT WHEN SHE FINALLY TURNED WITH BLOOD IN HER HAIR AND BANDAGES AROUND HER EAR, HIS FIANCÉE ANSWERED A QUESTION NOBODY HAD ASKED.

I didn't sleep after the second message.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Mia standing on Enzo's staircase, clutching a rabbit and asking why nobody had come for her. I also saw Marco DeLuca's face. He was the man who'd carried grocery bags for our elderly cook when she fractured her ankle. He was the man who had stepped between Serena and me at the gate without being asked. He looked like someone who kept his promises.

But so had Serena, in every photograph printed beside Enzo's name.

Detective Alvarez advised me not to respond to the anonymous messages. She arranged for the hospital to limit visitors and promised to examine the number through proper legal channels. Enzo left with two officers following his car, not a private army. Before he walked out, he told me not to mistake suspicion for proof.

“We're going to ask Marco questions,” he said. “We're not going to decide he's guilty because someone sent an accusation to your phone.”

I appreciated that. It would have been easy for Enzo to issue orders in anger. It would have been easier still for people around him to obey them without asking why.

By morning, I was discharged with instructions to attend an audiology appointment and rest. Lily drove me to our father's apartment instead of the mansion. Dad was seated near the window under a patchwork blanket, trying to repair a small radio he no longer had the strength to lift easily.

“There's my girl,” he said. Then he saw the bandages. The screwdriver slipped from his hand. “Ruby.”

“I know. I should have told you.”

He gripped my good hand as I described the injury. I left out the most frightening details until he'd had time to breathe. Dad had worked for the city transit system before illness ended his shifts. He hated being dependent on anyone and hated even more that Lily and I carried that weight in silence.

“Your mother used to say one thing when people tried to scare her into being quiet,” he told me. “She'd say, 'A job can be replaced. A life can't.' Promise me you remember that.”

“I promise.”

“Then stop measuring your worth by whether you can afford my pills.”

His voice broke. Mine did too.

Later, while Lily made soup, I received a call from Teresa. Mia had woken up crying because she couldn't find Helen. Enzo had allowed Helen to join her for breakfast with a social worker present. Mia kept asking whether breakfast chairs could disappear when people stood up. No one knew where that fear came from.

“She's counting exits,” Teresa said. “And she won't eat unless someone tastes the food first.”

I thought of a little girl being told that the people she loved could vanish without warning. “Tell her I'm thinking of her,” I said. “Only if the doctor thinks it's okay.”

“I will.”

A message arrived from Alvarez an hour later. She wanted my help identifying an object in the white-van photograph. She arranged a video call so I wouldn't have to travel. The image showed a waterside building with a peeling green roof and a sign almost hidden behind tree branches. At the edge of the frame was a small red case.

“Do you recognize it?” Alvarez asked.

“No. But the hinges remind me of portable audio equipment. We used cases like that at the recording studio.”

“That's what our technical team thought. The anonymous source may be connected to Victor Dane.”

She told me Marco was being interviewed. He hadn't run. He had disclosed his old phone records and asked for a lawyer, which she emphasized was entirely within his rights. I felt relieved and ashamed of that relief at the same time.

At the mansion, Enzo stood by the breakfast table where he and Mia had been reunited as strangers learning one another. The child had selected a small chair between Helen and Dr. Mercer. Enzo had placed his own chair a few feet away so she could approach him if she wanted.

“Can we paint Button a new nose?” Mia asked.

“Of course,” he said. “What color?”

“Pink. He looks sad.”

Enzo looked at the rabbit. “I think he's had a long week.”

Mia smiled for a second. Then she looked toward the window and grew serious.

“Daddy, when I was little, there was a song before the scary room.”

Enzo set down his fork. “What kind of song?”

“The one at the wedding. The lady called it your song.”

Dr. Mercer asked gently, “Do you want to tell us about it, or would you rather draw?”

“Draw.”

They brought her paper and crayons. She drew a piano, a square building, and three little stick figures. Two wore blue circles around their heads. The third had a long brown rectangle over its face.

“What are the circles?” the doctor asked.

“Headphones,” Mia answered. “So I couldn't hear them.”

Enzo's stomach clenched. He did not ask who they were. Instead, he told her she could leave the drawing on the table or keep it for herself.

By afternoon, Alvarez came to the mansion to interview Marco. Enzo insisted on being present only for the beginning and then walked away, recognizing that his presence might influence the answers. Later, he told me what Marco had voluntarily disclosed, after investigators confirmed what could be shared.

Five years earlier, Marco had been responsible for transportation during the lake vacation. A severe storm had delayed the family car. Vittorio Vitale, who was then a supposedly trusted business associate, had called offering a white medical van to evacuate Alessia and Mia from the lodge. Marco had accepted. He'd given the driver the private service entrance code and never recorded the van's license plate.

“Why?” I asked Enzo on the phone.

“Because Vittorio told him Alessia requested it,” he said. “Marco was dealing with a landslide on the access road. He says he believed it.”

“What happened after?”

“The van arrived. Alessia and Mia vanished. Marco spent the next five years thinking his decision got them killed.”

“So he lied about the van?”

“He omitted it from his report. He says my father's associates were threatening him, and he didn't want to admit he'd handed our location to strangers.”

Enzo sounded tired, not furious. I wondered what it did to a person to discover that grief had been built on so many half-truths.

“Do you believe him?”

“I believe the security footage of him walking into the interview room voluntarily. Everything else needs evidence.”

That night, Lily drove me to the mansion for a short supervised visit with Mia. I had taken three days' leave and was free to leave whenever I wanted. Enzo had made sure his staff understood that. The house seemed smaller without the engagement decorations. The flowers had been removed, and the dining room table was bare.

Mia met me in a playroom decorated with paper stars Teresa had cut from old magazines. She wore pajamas covered in tiny moons. Button had a freshly painted pink nose.

“I remember you,” she said. “You had the hurt ears.”

“I still do. They're getting better, slowly.”

“Do they make noise inside?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“Mine did when they put the big headphones on me.”

I crouched beside her but didn't move closer. “That sounds uncomfortable.”

She nodded. “They said the loud music would make me forget.”

My chest tightened. “Who said that?”

“An old man with a silver watch.”

Dr. Mercer touched my arm, a gentle reminder not to turn this into questioning. I stepped back and asked whether she wanted to show me the paper stars. Mia happily did. We spent twenty minutes naming constellations neither of us could see through the cloudy window.

On the way downstairs, I met Enzo beside the fireplace. He looked exhausted.

“Thank you,” he said. “She talks to you without feeling examined.”

“Because I wasn't examining her.”

He gave a small, sad smile. “That may be why.”

His phone lit up with a call from Alvarez. He listened for nearly a minute. Then the color drained from his face.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Victor Dane was found.”

“Alive?”

“Yes. At a motel in Wisconsin. But he's refusing to return to Illinois until someone promises his sister protection.”

“Why his sister?”

Enzo looked past me toward the empty dining room. “Because someone took her yesterday. Victor says the man with the silver watch ordered it.”

I remembered Mia's drawing. The man who'd told her music could make her forget.

“Vittorio?” I whispered.

“We don't know yet.”

Then Enzo added one detail that froze me.

“Victor says his sister's name is Alessia.”

I stood beside the kitchen window, watching a gray squirrel pick its way along the fence. Its ordinary movements were almost offensive against the upheaval inside me. I remembered the first time I'd served dinner at the Caruso estate, when I'd mistaken the quiet hallways and expensive furniture for security. Now I knew how a grand house could hide unbearable uncertainty. I wondered how many other families had been told their loved ones were dead because a powerful person found it convenient. I opened my notebook and wrote down the new name carefully, keeping it separate from the name of Enzo's wife. Identical first names were not identical lives, and an investigator would need to know exactly which woman had been seen and when.

For a moment I thought I had misheard.

“Alessia what?”