The air in the study felt as heavy as lead.

I stared at Vanessa, completely paralyzed. Luca turned his head, his dark, calculating eyes locking onto me.

"What?" I whispered, my voice barely functioning. "I've never met your mother, Mr. Moretti. I was hired three months after she died."

Vanessa laughed again, a sharp, ugly sound that echoed in the high-ceilinged room.

"Oh, you didn't know her, Megan," Vanessa sneered, walking closer to the desk. "But she knew you. She knew all about you. Why do you think you got this job?"

Answer one: My hiring wasn't a coincidence. Isabella Moretti had orchestrated it before her death.

"I applied through the agency," I stammered, touching the tape on my glasses nervously. "Mrs. Carter interviewed me."

"Mrs. Carter hired you because Isabella told her to!" Vanessa yelled. She turned back to Luca. "Your saint of a mother spent her last weeks investigating my background. She didn't trust me. She hired private investigators to dig into my past."

Luca's face was completely unreadable. "And what did she find?"

Vanessa's chest heaved. "She found out that I wasn't a licensed grief counselor. She found out I was in debt to your uncle Silvio. I was sent here to get close to you, to manipulate you into signing over the Southside shipping ports to him."

Luca didn't blink. "I know."

Vanessa froze. "You... you know?"

"I've known since the day you moved in," Luca said coldly. "Silvio is an idiot. I let you stay so I could feed him false information about our operations through you. I proposed to you so he would think he had won, right up until the moment I crush him at the wedding."

A reversal struck me so hard my knees went weak. Luca hadn't been duped by the beautiful, treacherous woman. He had been using her the entire time.

"You bastard," Vanessa whispered, her face twisting in fury.

Open two: If Luca already knew Vanessa was a spy, what was in the letter that Isabella wrote to me? Why was Vanessa so terrified of it that she planned to frame Mrs. Carter?

"If you already knew," Vanessa spat, "then why do you care about the letter?"

"Because my mother wrote it," Luca said, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. "And you tried to destroy it. Where is it, Vanessa?"

Vanessa backed toward the study door again. "I didn't destroy it. I couldn't find it. Mrs. Carter hid it before Isabella died. I searched her room, the library, everywhere. The only reason I was firing her was so I could search her house!"

"You're lying," a calm, weary voice said from the doorway.

We all turned.

Mrs. Carter stood there, flanked by Daniel and another security guard. The elderly head housekeeper looked exhausted, but her back was straight, and she held a small, weathered leather journal in her hands.

"Mrs. Carter," Luca said, his voice instantly softening with respect.

Mrs. Carter walked slowly into the room, ignoring Vanessa completely. She stopped in front of Luca and handed him the journal.

"Your mother didn't write a single letter, Luca," Mrs. Carter said softly. "She wrote an entire journal. She asked me to keep it safe until the right person arrived."

Mrs. Carter turned and looked directly at me.

"Until Megan arrived."

I took a trembling step backward. "Me? Why?"

"Because of your father," Mrs. Carter said.

My heart hammered against my ribs. "My father died in a hit-and-run accident ten years ago. The police never found the driver."

"They didn't find the driver because the driver was protected," Luca said suddenly, staring at the open pages of the journal.

He looked up, his eyes filled with a profound, quiet horror.

"My mother didn't just investigate Vanessa," Luca whispered. "She investigated the accident that killed your father, Megan. Because she suspected my father ordered it."

The room spun. My broken glasses slipped down my nose again, but I didn't push them up.

"Why would your father order a hit on a high school history teacher?" I asked, my voice cracking.

Luca turned the journal around so I could see the photograph taped to the final page.

It was an old, faded Polaroid. It showed my father, much younger, standing outside a courthouse. And standing next to him, holding a thick manila envelope, was Isabella Moretti.

"Because," Luca said heavily, "your father wasn't just a teacher. He was the key witness who helped my mother try to send my father to federal prison twenty years ago."