Chapter 1 - The Girl Behind the Counter
“Take it off,” the bald man said. “Maybe that pretty little necklace will cover what you stole.”
Lila Vega stopped with the coffee pot halfway to a customer's cup. In the Harbor Diner, where red vinyl booths faced the street and breakfast was served all day, twelve people suddenly found reasons to study their plates.
“I didn't steal anything, Curtis.”
Curtis Brandt, the owner, slammed a fist onto the steel counter. Two mugs jumped. “Three hundred eighty dollars is gone from yesterday's register. You closed. You pay.”
Lila had worked the same graveyard shift for six years. She knew the difference between an honest mistake and a trap. Three weeks earlier, Curtis had ordered her to stop asking about the mysterious deductions on the servers' paychecks.
“Check the camera,” she said.
“I don't need a lesson from a waitress.” He reached for her name tag. Lila recoiled, and the coffee pot struck the counter with a hard, hollow sound.
A man stood from the booth nearest the window. He was tall, silver-haired, dressed in a charcoal suit without a tie. He had been eating toast beside a cup of black coffee. He hadn't spoken once.
“Take your hand off her,” he said.
Curtis turned. The color drained from his face.
“Mr. Moretti. I didn't know you were—”
“Then you should have treated her decently when you thought no one important was watching.”
The man crossed the diner slowly. A thick gold ring flashed on his hand. Customers shifted away from him without being asked. Lila knew the name Moretti. Everybody who had grown up near the waterfront knew it, even if nobody liked saying it out loud.
“What's your name?” he asked her.
She pointed to her tag. “Lila.”
His attention slipped from the tag to the chain at her collar. The little silver locket had fallen outside her uniform when Curtis grabbed at her.
“Where did you get that?”
“From my mother.”
“May I?”
It was the first question anyone had asked her that morning instead of giving an order. Lila hesitated, then opened the clasp herself. Inside were two faded photographs: a dark-haired young woman with an unsmiling mouth, and that same woman holding a baby wrapped in a yellow blanket.
The stranger's fingers trembled as he steadied the locket. He looked older all at once.
“Elena,” he whispered.
Lila stepped back. “You knew her?”
He lifted his eyes, wet and bewildered. “She was my daughter.”
For years Lila had imagined her mother's family as faceless people who had simply gone away. She had not imagined a man whose very name could silence a room.
“My mother told me her father was dead,” she said.
Salvatore Moretti closed the locket carefully. “Then she had a reason.”
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Under the counter, Lila's phone vibrated. It was a message from her sixteen-year-old brother, Owen.
Someone was at their apartment asking for Mom's necklace.
