My eyes lifted to hers.
She flinched at whatever she saw there, but she did not look away.
“They said if I told you, they would send him back to me in pieces.”
The words landed between us like shattered glass.
Grace pressed both hands against her stomach as if she might be sick.
“They told me Samuel lived. They said someone took him from the hospital. They said he has been alive this whole time.”
I turned toward the window.
Across the street, Mrs. Turner’s curtains were closed.
The old woman had looked so frightened at the gate. Pale. Uneasy. Begging me to check on Grace.
Or pushing me to listen.
“When did Mrs. Turner first speak to you?” I asked.
Grace blinked. “Mrs. Turner?”
“She heard you screaming.”
Grace looked toward the wall we shared with the outside world.
“No,” she whispered. “No one should have heard. I always closed the windows.”
“She heard enough.”
Grace’s face changed.
Not fear now.
Realization.
“She was always outside afterward,” Grace said slowly. “Every afternoon. I saw her through the kitchen window. Watering flowers. Sweeping the porch. Watching.”
I set the photograph down.
Chicago had taught me that there were no coincidences. There were only moves people made before you understood the game.
“Pack nothing,” I said. “Touch nothing else.”
“Where are you going?”
“To ask Mrs. Turner what she hears when no one is screaming.”
Grace grabbed my arm.
“Elias, wait.”
I looked down at her hand.
She let go, but only halfway.
“There’s something else,” she said.
I waited.
Her eyes filled again. “The man on the phone knew about the lullaby.”
A pressure built behind my ribs.
“What lullaby?”
“The one you sang in the hospital.”
I had never told anyone about that.
Not Matteo. Not my mother. Not the priest who buried the small white coffin.
Grace had been sedated after the doctors told us Samuel was gone. She didn’t know I stayed in that room for two hours with our son’s body wrapped in a blanket. She didn’t know I held him. She didn’t know I sang the only lullaby I remembered from childhood, badly and quietly, because no child of mine was going into the dark without hearing his father’s voice.
“How do they know that?” Grace whispered.
I did not answer.
Because there were only two possibilities.
Either someone had been inside that hospital room.
Or Samuel had never left it dead.
I crossed the street without calling my men.
That was my first mistake.
Mrs. Turner’s house sat behind a low iron fence and two rows of rosebushes. In daylight it looked harmless, almost fragile, with lace curtains and wind chimes hanging by the porch.
Harmless things never survived long in Chicago unless they were pretending.
I knocked once.
No answer.
I tried the handle.
Unlocked.
Inside, the house smelled like lemon polish and old paper. A clock ticked somewhere in the hall. The living room was neat, too neat. A teacup sat on the table, still half full.
“Mrs. Turner,” I called.
Nothing.
I moved through the house room by room.
Kitchen. Empty.
Guest room. Empty.
Bathroom. Empty.
Then I saw the stairs leading down to the basement.
