256. 🕯️ THE LAST LULLABY

Chapter 01 - The Song in the Rain

The first quiet night in the Moretti house began with a man standing in a doorway, afraid to move.

Dante Moretti had come upstairs because the screaming had stopped. For eleven months, one of his daughters had cried herself hoarse almost every evening. Sometimes both did. The doctors had called it grief, then separation anxiety, then a difficult phase. The nannies had used other words when they thought no one was listening.

But now Mia and Bella were asleep in the middle of the pink nursery bed, one curled into each side of the new maid. Their small hands were tangled in the black fabric of her uniform. Rain tracked down the window behind them. A stuffed elephant lay on the rug with its trunk pointed at the door.

The maid was humming.

Dante knew the tune before he knew he was holding his breath. Isabella had sung it in the kitchen when she was pregnant, barefoot, too impatient to wait for the kettle. She had sung it to their daughters during the eleven months she was allowed to know them. He had not heard it since the funeral.

“Where did you learn that song?” he asked.

The young woman looked up. A strand of brown hair had escaped her bun, and there was a damp patch on her collar where Bella had cried herself to sleep. She stopped humming so abruptly that Mia stirred.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“That isn't what I asked.”

She settled Mia with the flat of her hand. “My mother sang it. When I was little.”

Dante looked toward the photograph on the bedside table. Isabella stood in a summer garden, laughing at something outside the frame. He had taken that photograph the afternoon she told him they were expecting twins. He could remember the warm smell of cut grass, but not the last thing he had said to her on the morning she died.

“My wife sang that before the girls were born.”

The maid's eyes moved to the photograph. “I didn't know.”

Mia opened her eyes halfway. “Mommy song,” she murmured, and tucked her face beneath the maid's chin.

It was the sort of thing a child said without understanding the damage it could do. Dante gripped the doorframe. For a moment he saw Isabella sitting on that bed, an ordinary memory so complete that it made the room seem badly arranged around her absence.

“What is your name?”

“Sarah Jenkins.”

He already knew that. Her employment papers had been on his desk that morning. Twenty-eight, from Pennsylvania, references from a preschool and a family in New Jersey. She had been hired to help with laundry and the girls' evening routine while another nanny finished her notice.

Still, he heard himself ask, “Who are you really?”

Sarah watched him with something close to pity. That irritated him more than fear would have.

“I'm the woman holding your daughters,” she said quietly. “And if you wake them now, we'll all regret it.”

No one had spoken to him that way in his own house for years. He stepped back.

Downstairs, his security chief waited beside the staircase. Victor Rinaldi was fifty-nine, immaculate even at midnight, and had worked for Dante's father before Dante was old enough to shave.

“You found the girls settled?” Victor asked.

Dante hesitated. “Who recommended the new maid?”

“An agency. Why?”

“Check her references again.”

Victor's expression did not change. “I'll handle it.”

In the morning, Sarah found Bella sitting cross-legged at the foot of her bed, turning the ears of a cloth rabbit inside out. Mia was still asleep. The curtains were silver with daylight and the rain had become a light ticking in the gutters.

“Did I do something bad?” Bella asked.

Sarah sat beside her. “What makes you think that?”

“Daddy was sad.”

“Your daddy misses your mommy. That's different from being angry with you.”

Bella considered this. “Everybody misses her. But nobody says her name.”

Sarah had learned, during years of working with children, that grown-ups were often the ones most frightened by plain language. “Then we can say it,” she told Bella. “Isabella.”

Bella smiled at the sound and repeated it carefully, as if trying on a pair of shoes.

At breakfast Dante appeared without his jacket. There were shadows under his eyes and a fine cut across one knuckle. He watched Sarah spread butter on Mia's toast and didn't touch his coffee.

“My daughters' mother used to sing four lines,” he said when the girls were occupied. “How many do you know?”

Sarah wiped the knife on a napkin. “Four.”

“Sing them.”

She disliked the command. She also understood that refusing would turn a children's song into a contest neither of them wanted. She sang softly, with the kitchen clock ticking between the lines.

“Little boat, don't fear the rain. Every river knows your name. When the night has lost the shore, I'll be waiting at the door.”

Dante put down his cup.

“Is that right?” Sarah asked.

“Word for word.”

He opened the top drawer of a narrow cabinet and took out a folded piece of notepaper. Isabella's writing slanted toward the right, hurried but elegant. On the page were the same four lines, a little ink star beside the word shore.

Sarah touched the star before she could stop herself.

“My mother drew stars like that,” she said.

Victor entered before Dante could answer. He carried a leather folder and the polished expression of someone arriving at exactly the moment he'd intended. Sarah moved to gather the breakfast dishes.

“Leave those,” Dante said. “Victor, this is Sarah.”

“We've met.” Victor's smile was brief. “I hope the children have been manageable.”

“They've been children,” Sarah replied.

He looked at the paper beneath her fingertips. Something tightened around his mouth, then vanished. “Old songs have a way of turning up in strange places.”

When he left, Dante folded the paper twice and put it in his pocket.

That afternoon Sarah carried a basket of tiny socks into the nursery. She had not meant to examine Isabella's photograph. Yet she found herself picking it up, looking at the woman with the laughing eyes and a plain silver pendant at her throat.

Sarah knew that pendant. Her mother had owned its twin, though Sarah's had a chipped edge from years of being dropped in the kitchen sink. She wore it now beneath her uniform.

She turned the frame over. The cardboard backing had loosened, exposing the corner of another photograph hidden behind the first. In it a much younger Isabella stood beside a woman in a green coat. The woman's face was partly obscured by a crease, but the hands were unmistakable: long fingers, one crooked from an old injury.

Sarah had kissed those hands goodbye in a hospital room eight years earlier.