Eighteen years had passed since Elena Rose took her first steps.
She was twenty-one now. A junior at Columbia University, studying international law with the fierce, focused determination that apparently skipped zero generations in the Moretti bloodline.
She was also, without question, the most beautiful person I'd ever seen.
Not because of conventional standards of beauty though she had that too, with Sofia's elegant bone structure and something in her eyes that reminded everyone who looked carefully of photographs of me at eighteen.
But beautiful in the way that genuinely good people are beautiful. The kind that comes from knowing exactly who you are and refusing to apologize for any of it.
She was also, currently, sitting across from me at the kitchen table looking like she had something significant to say and wasn't sure how to begin.
