A Mother’s Warning

Emma got one line into the letter before her hands started shaking.

She held the page under the ballroom light, the paper creased down the middle and soft at the edges like it had been folded and unfolded a hundred times. Luca stood at her shoulder, not touching her, not speaking. Bianca had gone pale near the head table. Even the band had stopped pretending.

“Emma,” she read, and her voice came out thin. She cleared her throat and tried again.

“Emma, if you are reading this, then I was right to be afraid.”

That pulled a sound from the room. Not a word. Just air.

Emma kept going because if she stopped now, she didn’t know what she’d do.

“Do not blame the whole family. Isabella is not the danger. Luca may have the right heart, if he ever learns how to use it. Salvatore is the one you must never trust.”

Her jaw locked on the last name. She looked up at the woman under the black-and-gold crest. Isabella had one hand on the chair back, her knuckles white, her face gone almost gray.

“You kept this,” Emma said.

Isabella didn’t flinch. “Yes.”

“For twenty years?”

“Yes.”

Luca turned hard. “Why?”

Isabella’s mouth tightened. “Because if I gave it to her when it was written, it would have led him straight to her.”

Emma looked back at the page. There was more. Her mother’s handwriting pressed hard on the paper, the loops sharper where her hand must have sped up.

“If they have told you I was foolish, they are lying. If they have told you I disappeared by chance, they are lying. If they tell you to run from the truth, run from them first.”

Emma swallowed and read the next line out loud anyway.

“David is good. He is not weak. He raised you in every way that matters.”

Her chest gave a hard pull. Luca’s hand came up, stopped short of her arm.

She folded the page once, then twice, too tight.

“Don’t,” she said when he tried to reach again.

A chair scraped somewhere behind them. Bianca was already moving, one hand pressed to her mouth.