Chapter 8

Under no circumstances should our children be used to repair what their parents could not.

My skin prickled.

“So your father had been thinking about this for years.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think he forged it?”

Niko’s expression was troubled.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I’m not.”

“Why?”

He leaned forward.

“Because there’s something you don’t know about my father.”

I waited.

Niko looked directly at me.

“He never showed me the amendment.”

“What?”

“He told me your father had it.”

My thoughts stalled.

“But Dad said Vittorio brought it to him.”

“Yes.”

“And Vittorio told you Dad had it.”

“Yes.”

We stared at each other.

Two fathers.

Two different stories.

One forged document.

And suddenly the question was no longer simply why we had been married.

It was who had wanted each man to believe the other was responsible.

My phone vibrated on the table.

A message from my father.

I opened it.

Found something in your mother’s papers after you left. You and Niko need to see it together.

Below the message was a photograph of an old envelope.

On the front, in my mother’s handwriting, were three words.

For Thomas Vale.

Niko saw the name.

All color left his face.

“Who is Thomas Vale?” I asked.

He looked at me for several seconds before answering.

“My father’s attorney.”

“Then call him.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

Niko stared at the photograph.

“Because Thomas Vale died twelve years ago.”

He enlarged the image.

There was a postmark beneath the writing.

The letter had been mailed six months after my mother died.

Neither of us spoke.

Then I noticed one final detail.

The handwriting on the address was not my mother’s.

Only the words For Thomas Vale were hers.

Someone else had addressed the envelope.

Someone had found my mother’s private letter after her death.

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Someone who had known exactly where to send it.

And whoever that person was might finally explain why, fourteen years later, two families had been persuaded that the only way to honor the past was to force their children into a future neither of them had chosen.