It was his mother’s.
She understood that immediately when he set it on the kitchen table — the specific quality of the object, the careful preservation of it, the way he handled it with the particular attention reserved for things that had been kept because they couldn’t be replaced.
His mother was alive — in Boston, the Sunday phone calls, the woman who told him when he was wrong. This was not a memorial box. It was something else.
“She gave it to me when I was twenty-four,” he said. “After my father died. She said — keep this until you have someone to open it with.” He held Aria’s gaze. “I’ve been keeping it for thirteen years.”
Aria looked at the box. At him.
“Open it,” she said.
He opened it.
Inside was a letter — from his father, written before he died, addressed to Luca but ne
