Chapter 6
She was still packing when she saw Alex’s phone on the kitchen table. He’d come by earlier to help with the bags and left it next to the keys she’d be handing back to the landlord at the end of the month.
She shouldn’t look. She knew that. She knew it with the same clarity she’d felt when the numbers in the books didn’t add up.
The same certainty she’d had when she heard Renan speaking French in the hallway.
She shouldn’t look, because looking meant crossing a line. And in the last few weeks, she’d crossed more than her share of lines already.
A message from an unsaved number. No profile picture. No name. No history. Just one line:
Donna Cecilia lands in Boston on Tuesday.
She stared at the screen until it went dark. She tapped it awake. Read it again.
The tone was short, formal, closed off from reply. The kind of message that wasn’t a heads-up — it was a communiqué. An arrival notice.
Not Donna Cecilia would like to visit or Donna Cecilia is hoping to come. Lands. As though the decision were already settled, and all that remained was preparing the ground.
She had no idea who Donna Cecilia was. The name didn’t appear in a single spreadsheet, a single report, a single record she’d touched in her months with the Mancinis.
But something about that sentence — the formality, the title, the fact that Alex had never once mentioned this person — told her this wasn’t just anyone. This was someone with enough weight that her arrival merited an unsigned message and was treated as an event rather than a courtesy.
She put the phone back on the table. Exactly where it had been. In exactly the same position.
She finished packing in silence. She closed the apartment door behind her and carried the bag and the suitcase down the stairs.
May you like
And when she stepped out onto the street and the cold Boston air hit her face, the peace she’d held five minutes earlier didn’t feel quite as solid anymore.
Tuesday was four days away. And she had the uncomfortable, precise feeling — the kind of feeling a person who reads numbers for a living learns to trust — that the equation she was assembling in her head was not going to balance.
