Luca’s gaze dropped to my necklace. A small silver oval. Nothing expensive. My mother’s — the only thing of hers I still wore every single day.
Leo tugged it free from beneath my collar. The older man beside Luca, Marco DeSantis, went pale. “Boss.”
Luca looked. Inside the oval was a tiny engraved symbol: a six-pointed flower.
Luca stared at it. Then at me. “Where did you get that?” “My mother.” “What was her name?”
The question felt too personal, but something in his face stopped me from deflecting. “Claire Mercer.”
Marco pushed back his chair. Luca’s expression emptied. “What?” “My mother’s name was Claire Mercer.”
The baby lifted his head, touched the silver flower, then looked at Luca. Luca whispered, “No.”
I tightened my hold on Leo. “What is happening?”
Nobody answered at first. Then Luca reached into his jacket and took out a photograph — old, worn. A woman holding a newborn. She wore the same necklace. My necklace. My mother’s necklace.
My breath stopped. “That’s her.”
Luca stared at me. “That woman is Leo’s mother.”
The entire restaurant seemed to vanish. I looked at the baby in my arms, then at the photograph, then back at Luca. “That’s impossible.” His voice was quiet. “She died eleven months ago.”
I swallowed. “My mother died when I was nine.”
Silence. Marco looked at Luca. Luca looked at me. Then Leo touched my face again, and I understood the impossible thing before anyone said it aloud: the woman in the photograph was not my mother. She was someone who looked exactly like her.
Luca asked, “Did Claire Mercer have a sister?” I shook my head. “No.” Then I remembered a sentence my grandmother used to say whenever I asked about my mother’s childhood: Claire had no family worth finding. My stomach turned cold.
Luca looked at Leo. Then at me. “Maybe she did.”
What came next
What happened in the minutes after that is harder to write about, because it did not feel like my life anymore. Marco DeSantis stepped away to make a call, his voice low and urgent. Greg hovered near the service door, torn between terror of Luca Moretti and terror of losing his best Friday-night waitress to whatever this was.
Luca asked me to sit down. Me — the waitress — at Table Twelve, in the middle of Aurelia, with Leo asleep against my shoulder like I was the only safe place in Philadelphia.