Prologue
Sicily, Thirteen Years Ago
The small cemetery sits high above the coast, the soft dark fronds of pointed cypress trees softening the glare of too much white marble under a clear blue Sicilian sky.
On the drive up, Spencer squeezed my fingers. “At least she can see the sea.”
But she can’t, I wanted to yell. She’ll never see the sea again.
I stand beside the only love I have left.
He presses his shoulder to mine, a gesture of support that no one else should see.
She was the only person who ever saw. The only one who understood.
The only one who tried. In fourteen months, she carved her name into my chest so deeply she’ll never be replaced.
Chess Rossi—Francesca to everyone else.
Orphaned at twelve by the mafia savages who kidnapped her sister, Nina.
I can still see Chess sobbing as she told me the story.
Nina hid Chess first, then disappeared. Later, when her sister never came for her, Chess assumed Nina was lost forever, like the thousands of other girls who’d been trafficked or killed on the island over the previous few years.
One option was worse than the other, but she could never speak it aloud.
I sensed how she felt; it seemed wrong to wish her only sister gone.
I can’t begin to imagine how Chess would have felt if she had known her sister was still alive.
The chapel is open to the air—a marble corridor of loculi (tombs) with bronze nameplates that catch the light.
Rosaries click. Incense hangs sweet and heavy, clawing at my throat.
And far below, the sea hammers the rocks on its usual schedule as if nothing has changed.
For once, I’m grateful to hear it. Spencer’s right; she’d want that.
Spencer’s fingertips brush my sleeve. “Breathe,” he mouths.
I breathe in lime dust and memories.
Throughout our childhood, each summer Spencer and I stayed with my Grandmother, or Nonna as we called her, at her lemon grove in Italy.
We adore Nonna; she’s ninety-four but is a formidable woman.
She still runs her lemon grove practically single-handedly.
Her house has become the only proper home Spencer and I have ever known.
Last year, Papa introduced us to Francesca.
He explained that he’d rescued her from the streets of Palermo at twelve years old.
She’d spent her formative years growing up on an olive grove until the Mafia made her an orphan.
In their wisdom, my parents believed this qualified Chess, as we nicknamed her, to be the ideal person to assist my stubborn Nonna in her advancing years with her farm.
Papa firmly told us to consider her a sister.
Ridiculous. She was the most beautiful girl we’d ever seen; her timid smile stole the hearts of two abandoned, privileged boys raised in a world opposite from her own, on a land she longed to visit and now never will.
It sounds miserable to say we connected over loneliness and abandonment, but we did—and it was anything but miserable.
It was wonderful, beautiful; she made us complete.
Our family of two became three. We read one another’s glances, breathed at the same rhythm.
We were a unit, not the abandoned freaks we’d felt before.
Spencer and I couldn’t see her daily, but we felt her spirit every hour, even when we were apart.
We gave ourselves to one another. For the first time in our lives, we held perfection.
Though our love was as three, Spencer always seemed to understand that my bond with Chess was more clearly defined.
I thought it was forever. It would have been forever if the man who should have loved me, my papa, hadn’t ripped our lover from our arms in a flurry of disgust and shame.
Spencer’s shoulder presses harder into mine. The frantic clicking of rosary beads tells me she’s coming. My eyes sting mercilessly, but the tears won’t fall, because if they do, it means they’ve accepted it. I’ve accepted this, and I can’t.
Then the coffin—oak, polished to a gleam, with a zinc liner because here law and money mean the dead don’t get buried in soil.
Latin spills quickly in a flat, uncomfortable monotone as the priest raises his hand. The bearers guide her forward to the waiting niche.
Pressure builds at the base of my skull and the island tilts, as I watch six men slide the oak box containing my girl into a dark hole in a wall.
Stealing her from me forever. I press my soles down, trying to connect skin to stone through leather.
Anything to stop myself lunging for one last hold of her.
One last sweep of my fingers through her silken hair.
Since Papa’s call last week, my heart has bled. I’ve told myself with certainty I’ll never see her, hear her, or touch her again. But she will still touch me. When I close my eyes, she’s there, and I won’t let her go. I can’t. She’s mine. She was always meant to be mine.
While the priest provides some theater. I watch a mason step forward and slather white mortar along the lip of the opening with quick, practiced strokes.
The wet scrape of his trowel ricochets off stone, louder than the priest’s tuneless hymn.
A veined marble slab arrives on two men’s shoulders and settles. Someone flinches. Someone else sobs.
My palms are damp. My jaw won’t unlock. She’s really gone.
When we arrived in Sicily yesterday, Papa was furious.
We went to him looking for answers about Chess’ death, but he pointedly refused to give them.
Reluctantly, we were granted permission to attend the funeral, but never his blessing.
When he ordered us not to speak to Nina, his words staggered us.
We always believed that since traffickers had taken her, she wouldn’t be seen again.
He was unimpressed with our display of emotions, insisting that if anyone questioned us at the funeral, Francesca was a stranger to us.
He gave us a story about being English history students—tourists here to witness a traditional Sicilian funeral, but we were never to mention our names.
Papa mumbled about threats from families we were “too young to understand.” He didn’t attend.
He stayed with Mama, who was “too emotional to pay her respects.” Instead, a guard is accompanying us, here to “keep us in line.”
A woman steps up. I stare at her. She can only be Chess’ sister; she didn’t have anyone else. Even through the black veil, I see Chess in her fine cheekbones, delicate neck, and her gloss of dark hair. Nina is older by almost a decade, but the shared genes can’t be denied.
That Nina was still breathing when Chess assumed her to be dead—that raises a tear. She thought she was alone, forgotten, but by the look of Nina’s trembling form, her sister never forgot her.
She reads, her voice soft and steady. “My sister was light,” she says in Italian. “Even when the island was cruel, she was kind.” Her voice carries, and my throat closes.
I stare at the slab and try to burn through it. Light? Kind? She was alive—luminescent, sunstruck. No marble can hold that. My fingers bite the pew’s edge until the grain prints my skin.
The final prayer ends. Someone raises and screws the bronze nameplate onto the stone.
FRANCESCA ROSSI
The dates between her birth and death are too short. It’s unfair.
Why is this loss accepted here? Why does nobody seek answers?
Mourners spill into the courtyard, chasing shade they won’t keep. Women in black trade handkerchiefs; men light cigarettes and murmur. We don’t follow. I vaguely wonder who they are. When she had no-one aside from us in life, where do all these onlookers come from in death?
I keep my eyes on the sealed loculo, daring the marble to admit the truth. Spencer waits beside me, steady as a post.
Nina is half-hidden by suited men. Only her right hand shows as she traces her sister’s name, as if committing the letters to skin. After several minutes, one man removes her fingers from the plaque, kisses them and gathers her in. Consolation, which looks more like custody.
On legs that feel borrowed, I stumble to the tomb and press my palm to the cool slab—mortar still faintly damp under the edge, clamps still warm from the hammer. “Ciao, Bellezza,” I whisper. “Ti ho sempre amato, Bellezza. Aspettami.” I have always loved you. Wait for me.
Spencer lays our lilies down. Voices flare—Nina’s, asking who we are, how we knew her sister’s favorite flower. Hushed explanations. But no one approaches us, maybe because only she cares.
Outside, the light is too bright. Spencer falls in beside me, shoulder to shoulder, like always. We walk between the cypress toward the gate, away from the chapel that will not have my name, past the men who watch everything and forget nothing.
Behind us, the bells start again. The slab holds. But the island pretends it is innocent. Someone isn’t.