The invitation arrived by hand.
Not email, not a phone call, not a message relayed through the hospital’s administrative system. A sealed envelope, cream paper, delivered by a man in a dark car who waited at the hospital’s main entrance and handed it to me without a word when I emerged at the end of my shift. My name on the front in handwriting I recognized from a wedding gift card seven years ago.
Lucia De Luca did not use the telephone for things that mattered.
I opened it in the elevator. A single card, the family’s personal stationery, and six lines in the same hand, requesting my presence at the De Luca estate the following afternoon at two o’clock. *A private matter of mutual interest.* No mention of Damian. No mention of Marco. The word *private* doing the work that an instructio
