We didn't respond to the letter immediately.
That was deliberate a decision Elena Rose made herself, which told me everything about how thoroughly she'd inherited the particular Moretti capacity for strategic patience that had taken me decades to develop.
"We don't respond until we know more," she said, setting the letter carefully on the kitchen table as though it were something that might detonate if handled incorrectly. "We don't reveal what we know. We don't reveal what we're thinking. We gather information first."
"You sound like Connor," I told her.
"I sound like you. Connor sounds like you too. It's a whole thing."
She called James that evening. Then young Dante Castellano. Then, after some consideration, Lucia Castellano young Dante's seventeen-year-old sister, who turned out to be significantly less surprised by the letter's existence than anyone had anticipated.
