Elena did not sleep that night. Her body rested on the mattress in Dante’s master bedroom, but her mind would not settle. Every time she shut her eyes, she saw the envelope Dante hid in his drawer. The one she wasn’t supposed to see. The one that held a truth he never meant for her to know.
Her mother’s name.
Her mother’s handwriting.
Her mother’s warning.
For hours she lay there, staring at the ceiling, fighting the memory of those sentences written in hurried ink. Words that should never have belonged to a dead woman. Words that shattered everything Elena thought she understood.
Dante wasn’t asleep either. She could feel the tension in his body where he lay beside her, tense as stone, pretending to rest. His breathing was too controlled, too forced. His hands were rigid on the sheet
