Livia did not sleep.
She lay on the narrow edge of her bed with Noah curled in the small room beside hers and listened to the city make its tired sounds: pipes complaining inside the walls, a motorcycle coughing at the corner, rainwater dripping from a broken gutter into the courtyard below. Her body was exhausted from work, dinner, fear, and the constant discipline of not collapsing where anyone could see. Her mind, however, remained cruelly awake.
Dante had seen the photo.
Not a blurred image on a phone. Not a glimpse of a child in a hallway. A photo clear enough for him to study Noah's face. A photo from Noah's fourth birthday trip to the beach, when Helena had insisted the boy needed to see the ocean before growing too old to believe it had been waiting for him.
Livia had kept that
