Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Carmen’s text came at six in the morning: Dad’s clearing out the garage Saturday. Your last boxes are still in there. Paula says come get them before he dumps everything. I’ll be there. Please come.
I read it three times, standing in the kitchen in my bathrobe, coffee going cold in my hand. My last boxes. The ones I hadn’t grabbed when I’d moved out because I’d been too busy shoving clothes and toiletries into suitcases and trying not to cry in front of the movers.
Three months ago I’d taken what I could carry and fled to Aunt Amelia’s cottage, and whatever was left in that garage had been sitting there since, waiting for me to come back for it.
Probably the things Sal hadn’t bothered to notice — my grandmother’s recipe tin, the photo albums from before digital, the Christmas ornaments the kids had made in elementary school that he’d never cared about because decorating was my job.
“Paula suggested it,” Rosaria said from the toaster’s chrome side. She looked smug, which was impressive for a reflection the size of a playing card. “She was always susceptible. A little nudge in the right direction and she picks up the phone.”
I turned the toaster to face the wall. “You put this idea in Paula’s head?”
“I cannot move objects or dial telephones. But I can... suggest. When someone is open to it.” Rosaria’s voice carried the faintest hint of satisfaction. “Paula was thinking about you already. Missing you, though she would never admit it. I simply gave the thought a push.”
“That’s manipulative.”
“That is efficient. I need you in that house, Gina. I need your eyes where mine cannot go anymore. I need you to find out what my family is up to.”
I didn’t want to go. Every cell in my body was voting against it. But the recipe tin had been my grandmother’s, and Carmen would be there, and underneath the dread was something I didn’t want to examine too closely — I wanted to see my kids.
“Fine,” I told the toaster. “But you don’t get to coach me. I’m getting my boxes and I’m leaving.”
Rosaria said nothing, which was her version of agreeing to nothing.
The house sat on a hill in a suburb overlooking the ocean, and pulling into the driveway felt like driving back into a life I’d already shed.
Sal had bought it when his practice took off — too big, too new, trying too hard.
Rosaria had picked out every tile and fixture, because Sal’s idea of decorating was a recliner and a TV, and I’d spent fifteen years living in my mother-in-law’s taste and pretending it was mine.
Three months ago I’d walked out the front door with two suitcases and a garbage bag of shoes and hadn’t been back since.
Three cars were already parked out front. I recognized Sal’s BMW, George and Claudia’s SUV, and Paula’s paint-splattered Subaru. Carmen’s little Honda was tucked at the end of the row.
I sat in my car for a full minute, hands on the steering wheel, breathing the way Lori had taught me. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Don’t set anything on fire.
Carmen met me at the front door. She threw her arms around me before I’d even crossed the threshold, and I held on longer than I should have, breathing in her shampoo, feeling her solid and real and here. Twenty-three years old and still the bravest person I knew.
“You look good, Mom,” she said, pulling back to study me. “Rested.”
“Liar.”
“Okay, you look alive. That’s an improvement over last time.”
The foyer opened into the living room, where Josie was sitting on the couch scrolling her phone.
She glanced up when I walked in, and for half a second something moved across her face — not warmth, exactly, but recognition.
The muscle memory of a daughter seeing her mother.
Her lips parted. Her phone lowered an inch.
Then her eyes flicked to the dining room, where Sal’s voice was carrying, and whatever she’d been about to say retreated behind her teeth.
She gave me a nod so small it barely qualified as a facial movement and looked back down.
That nod. Twenty-eight years of raising her, and I got a nod. But it was the glance toward her father that stayed with me — the checking, the calibrating. She’d looked at Sal the way you look at a boss before you speak out of turn.
Nick was in the kitchen doorway. He saw me, and his whole body did this thing — a lean forward, weight shifting to the balls of his feet, one hand coming off the doorframe.
For one second he was moving toward me. Then he caught himself.
His hand went back to the frame. He opened his mouth, closed it, and turned to the counter where he picked up a glass of water with both hands, like he needed something to hold so his arms had a purpose that wasn’t greeting his mother.
He drank the water without tasting it. I could tell because he grimaced — it was the filtered water from the fridge that Sal kept ice-cold, and Nick had always hated cold water. He drank it anyway. Kept his back to me. His shoulders were tight enough to crack walnuts.
“Gina.” Sal’s voice came from the dining room, and it carried the warmth of a January sidewalk.
He appeared in the doorway, arms crossed, still handsome in that faded way that worked on dental hygienists and apparently not on wives of thirty years.
“Your stuff’s in the garage. Five boxes.
I was going to drop them at Goodwill next week, so good timing. ”
“You were going to donate my grandmother’s recipe tin.”
“I didn’t know what was in them. You left them.”
“I left in a hurry. There’s a difference.”
I should have gone straight to the garage. Grabbed the boxes, loaded the car, driven back to Starfall Bay. That was the plan. That was the smart plan.
Instead, Carmen handed me a cup of coffee and pulled me to the kitchen table, and I sat down because saying no to Carmen was something I’d never been able to do.
From the kitchen, I could see into the living room and the dining room beyond, and I found myself watching the family the way Tammy might—reading the room, looking for what people were trying to hide.
George was in the corner of the living room, perched on the edge of an armchair like he was ready to bolt.
Sal’s younger brother had always been the quiet one, the one who faded into the background at family events.
He was fidgeting with his phone, turning it over and over in his hands.
When Sal said something to him from the other room, George flinched before answering.
“Uncle George has been weird lately,” Carmen murmured, following my gaze. “More than usual. He spends all his time in the den with his model airplanes. Claudia says he locks the door and won’t come out for hours.”
George’s model airplanes. I’d forgotten about those.
He’d been building them for years—intricate, detailed replicas that took months to finish.
It was the one thing that was entirely his, the one space where Rosaria’s judgment couldn’t reach him.
She’d called it a waste of time. Sal had called it pathetic. George just kept building.
Claudia swept in from the dining room carrying a cheese plate nobody had asked for.
She set it on the counter with the practiced grace of a woman who’d made hosting look effortless for two decades.
Blonde highlights, tennis tan, a cream cashmere sweater that probably cost more than my monthly grocery budget.
Everything about Claudia was polished and precise, like a showroom display.
“Gina, can I get you anything? Something to eat? There’s that brie you used to like.
” Her smile was perfect. Warm, concerned, the ideal daughter-in-law stepping up in a difficult moment.
She’d been doing this since Rosaria’s death—filling the matriarch-shaped hole with volunteer work and cheese plates and gentle competence.
“I’m fine, thanks.”
Claudia arranged the crackers around the brie with the focus of someone defusing a bomb. “I keep doing things like this and thinking she’d critique the presentation. She would, too. You know how she was—everything had to be just so.” She gave a small, fond laugh.
Something caught the light at Claudia’s throat. A strand of pearls, creamy white against her tan skin. Elegant. Familiar.
Rosaria’s pearls.
Claudia saw me looking and touched them lightly. “Rosaria would have wanted someone to wear them. They were just sitting in the jewelry box. George said I should have them.”
“They look nice,” I said, because what else could I say?
Claudia smiled again and glided toward the living room. “Oh, I meant to ask everyone—I’m chairing the Humane Society benefit next Tuesday. We’re doing a silent auction, and I really hope you’ll all come and bid. It’s for a wonderful cause. The shelter needs a new wing.”
Paula, who’d been silent in the corner with a glass of red wine that was not her first, let out a laugh. “A benefit. My mother’s only been dead a few months and you’re chairing benefits.”
“Paula.” George’s voice was quiet, warning.
“What? I’m just saying.” Paula took a long drink.
She was the youngest of Sal’s siblings, the rebel—tattooed, sharp, an artist Rosaria had dismissed at every opportunity.
Her hair was shorter than the last time I’d seen her, dyed a deep red Rosaria would have despised.
“The old witch would’ve hated it. All that money going to dogs instead of the family name. ”
“Don’t call her that,” George said, still quiet, still fidgeting with his phone.
“She called me worse.” Paula raised her glass in a mock toast. “To Rosaria. May she rest in whatever passes for peace when you’ve spent fifty years making everyone around you miserable.”
The room went tight. Sal’s jaw worked. Nick studied his water glass. Josie’s thumb stopped scrolling.
Carmen squeezed my hand under the table.
I looked at this family—my family, once—and I saw fault lines everywhere.
George, wound so tight he might snap. Claudia, smooth and composed and already wearing the dead woman’s jewelry.
Paula, drowning her grief in cabernet and honesty.
Sal, who’d lost his mother and his wife in the same year and seemed mostly angry about the inconvenience of both.
And my kids. My kids, caught in the middle of all of it, choosing sides in a war they hadn’t started.
Rosaria had been quiet since I’d walked through the front door, which should have worried me. It did worry me. Rosaria was never quiet without a reason.
I found her in the hallway, reflected in the glass of a framed family photo—the one from George and Claudia’s twentieth anniversary, everyone smiling, Rosaria at the center in her pearls. She was staring at the photo version of herself with an expression I couldn’t read.
“George always was weak,” she said, as I passed.
“Even as a boy. No spine. He let Salvatore bully him, let me bully him, let everyone bully him because it was easier than fighting back.” She paused.
“He married Claudia because she was the first woman who told him what to do and did not make him feel ashamed of needing it.”
I stopped, pretending to look at the photo. “Rosaria—“
“And she is wearing my pearls.” Her voice went sharp enough to cut glass.
“My mother’s pearls. She claimed them the week after the funeral.
The week, Gina. Before I was even cold in the ground.
Told George she wanted something to remember me by.
” A sound that was almost a laugh. “As if she needed the pearls to remember the woman who told her she was not good enough for her son.”
“You told everyone that.”
“Because it was true of everyone. My sons had terrible taste.” She gave me a look. “Present company very much included.”
“Charming.”
I moved down the hall. Rosaria moved with me, skipping from the photo frame to a decorative mirror to the glass panel in the den door.
“Paula was always the disappointment,” Rosaria continued, her voice softer now, drifting from the den door’s glass to the window at the end of the hall.
“The tattoos. The art. The refusal to be what I wanted. I told her she was wasting her life and she told me to go to hell and we never recovered from that.”
I waited.
“She did not mean it. I did not mean it either. But the Ferraros do not apologize. It is a genetic deficiency.”
From the living room, Paula’s voice carried—something sharp to Sal, who fired back. The normal Ferraro soundtrack.
“Who killed you, Rosaria?” I said it quietly, facing the window, my back to the hallway. “You’ve been in this house. You’ve been watching them. Just tell me.”
Her form flickered. The edges went staticky, the way they had in my bathroom that first night. “I’m afraid I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Can’t.” The word came out strained.
“Then lead me,” I said.
“I am trying.” And for once, she sounded tired. Not imperious, not demanding. Just tired, and old, and dead. “Go back to the gathering. Watch. Everyone in that room had a reason to want me gone. Your job is to figure out who acted on it.”
I walked back to the kitchen, where Carmen was arguing with Josie about something I couldn’t hear and Nick was refilling his water glass for the third time.
Claudia was wiping down a counter that was already clean, pearls gleaming at her throat.
George hadn’t moved from his armchair. Paula was pouring another glass of wine.
Everyone in this family had a reason to want Rosaria dead. She’d made sure of that. Fifty years of control and criticism and conditional love, and now she was gone and the wreckage she’d left behind was sitting in a McMansion eating brie and pretending to be fine.
I collected my boxes from the garage, loaded them into my car, and hugged Carmen goodbye. She held on tight.
“Let’s get together soon, Mom. Please.”
“We will, sweetheart.”
I drove the thirty-minutes home to Starfall Bay with Rosaria riding silent in the rearview mirror, both of us thinking about the family she’d built and the secrets they were keeping.