I'll process this now. The Song That Broke the Silence

I drove back to Long Island in silence.

Vincent sat in the passenger seat and said nothing, which was the right thing to do.

There are moments when a man needs the space between words, and Vincent had always known how to read those moments.

By the time I pulled through the gate, it was past ten o'clock.

The house was lit from the upper floor — the playroom window, warm and yellow against the dark.

Grace was still up there with the girls.

I sat in the car for a moment after the engine went off.

Isabelle had found the cooperation agreement.

That was the only thing that made sense now.

Enzo had been building his exit for years — quietly, carefully, the way he did everything — and somehow Isabelle had stumbled across the edge of it.

A document.

A name.

A phone number she didn't recognize.

She would have pulled at that thread the way she pulled at everything she didn't understand, steadily and without drama, until she had enough to know it was serious.

And then she would have done exactly what Enzo feared.

Not gone to the FBI herself.

Gone to me.

She had been three days away from telling me that the man I trusted most in this world was selling everything I had built to save his own skin.

So he had her kjlled and told Marco it was my order.

And for fourteen months I had been grieving a woman I thought I understood, never knowing the last thing she had been trying to do was protect me.

I got out of the car.

The house was quiet downstairs.

I went to the kitchen and stood at the counter for a moment, not wanting anything, just needing to be somewhere that still felt like the place where my daughters had been singing that afternoon.

Where the song had been real.

"Mr.

Romano."

Grace was in the doorway.

Still dressed.

She had a small notebook in her hand.

"The girls are asleep," she said.

"All three of them in Nora's room.

I didn't want to separate them tonight."

"That's fine."

She stepped into the kitchen.

"I found something.

While I was sitting with them." She held out the notebook.

"It was in the window seat.

In the library.

Tucked under the cushion in the left alcove."

I took it.

The cover was plain.

Dark blue.

Isabelle's handwriting on the first page — her name, a date from two years ago, and three words beneath it.

*In case something.*

My hands were very still.

"I didn't read past the first page," Grace said.

"I closed it as soon as I saw her name."

I looked up.

"You could have," I said.

"I know." She met my eyes.

"It wasn't mine to read."

I opened the notebook.

Isabelle had been meticulous.

Dates, times, names, account numbers, phone records she had somehow obtained, a series of transactions that traced a clear line from Enzo's private accounts to a shell company in Delaware to a federal escrow arrangement that could only mean one thing.

She had cross-referenced everything.

She had written her conclusions in plain, careful sentences, the way she had always written, the way that had made her the best person I knew at seeing through complicated things to the simple truth underneath.

On the last written page, she had written one final note.

*I'm going to tell Dominic on Saturday.

I need him to hear it from me before anyone else.

I need him to know I'm not afraid of what this means.

I love him.

I trust him.

I think he'll know what to do.*

Saturday had been four days after she was kjlled.

I closed the notebook.

"Grace," I said.

"Yes."

"I need you to stay.