I read and reread the letter over and over to make sure my mind isn’t playing tricks on me.
Guilt fills me. I shouldn’t have waited this long to open the box. If I had found this letter right after he died, I could have caught the person responsible instead of it being almost fifteen years later.
What am I going to do?
Dad had told me to only trust the women in this family, not the men. But I can’t put Mom, Nonna, Gigi, and Lucia in harm’s way.
I look at Dad’s words. He had mentioned that Dominic was trustworthy.
I should pat myself on the back. Despite the protests of the family, I had made the right choice bringing him onto the case.
I take a picture of the letter with my phone. Then I crumple the note into a ball. I’m the only one who knows this information and I need to keep it that way. I can’t risk this confession falling into the wrong hands.
Taking a deep breath I throw the letter into the fireplace.
As the flames consume the letter, my father’s words echo in my mind.
The queen protects the empire.
“And the queen avenges the king,” I whisper.
Chapter twenty-nine
Dad is the king.
The first chess piece sent to me had been intentional.
It was a message that Dad had been killed first and now the rest of us would suffer the same fate one by one.
The killer had been mocking me this entire time and I never realized it.
These thoughts flood my mind as I spend the next day at home in bed.
I told everyone I was sick, and in a way, it’s true.
My spirit is unraveling.
I’m sick with guilt.
Sick with rage.
Sick with the realization that my father had kept a secret.
I pull the blankets over me like they can shield me from my dad’s confession.
Ten years since my father’s death. In all those years, I never once looked in that box. I had buried it in the shadows of the basement. I guess I didn’t want to deal with the fact that my father was truly gone. Anything he wanted me to have wouldonly make me miss him more. If I had opened the box, maybe I could have exposed the truth.
Instead, I allowed the killer to remain part of our family for years. This person had smiled in my face and pledged loyalty, all while keeping a secret about how my father died.
But the part that claws at me the most isn’t the murder.
It’s Francesca.
To think of my father loving another woman before my mother feels weird.
However, there is no denying the softness in my father’s words when he spoke about Francesca.
It’s cute how he believed, as a teen, that even when everything was against them, love could rewrite fate. That they could survive the hatred of their families and forge a life together. But their dreams of a happily-ever-after ended in tragedy and buried their unborn child in silence.
