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threatening, while she stood like a beggar, her hands gripping the cold metal bars blocking the wide driveway. She stared across the wide swath of grass at Joseph Bianchin’s house, stared so hard her eyes hurt.
    House?
    No, it wasn’t a house. It was a mansion, built in the style of a formal Italian villa. Its pale yellow stucco wallsrose two stories to a flat roof. Along the top, a balustrade ran like a series of stone teeth, and in the forward left corner a narrow watchtower rose, surveying the countryside with cold authority.
    Penelope was an interior designer; architectural classes had been a requirement for her degree, but she so loved the craft she’d taken extra credits. So she knew her stuff. She knew the building before her was perfectly designed, perfectly proportioned, a monument to good taste. But its perfection repelled rather than attracted… or maybe it was simply that she had stood here for ten minutes, fruitlessly pushing the electronic buzzer and getting no response, and so she hated the place.
    She supposed she shouldn’t have expected Joseph Bianchin to open the door to her so easily. She’d thoroughly investigated him, reading every biography she found online and following up every rumor.
    The verdict was unanimous: The man was like the house that stood before her: arrogant, cold, friendless, and uncaring. His wealth had been handed to him by his family and he had ruthlessly increased it by fair means and foul.
    The dense shade of the live oak trees that dotted the lawn increased the gloom that hung over the place, and although at a distance she could see a single, tall, thin, aging Asian gardener who clipped the spent blooms off the rhododendrons, she had to admit the house had an air of abandonment.
    Joseph Bianchin wasn’t home. From the looks of things, he had been away for a while.
    But in her life, she’d been rejected so many times… and to have come so far, to be standing at this gate and have to leave without saying what she’d come to say…
    A dreadful thought brought her up short.
    Oh, God. What if he was dead? She’d packed and loaded the car and made the drive from Oregon without allowing herself to think too much about what she meant to do. Because if she really thought about it, she was afraid she would chicken out.
    But she knew the facts. Joseph Bianchin was eighty-one years old. He could have died yesterday, or the day before, or while she visited her mother’s grave and tried to express her frustration and unhappiness in a manner both respectful and firm. Because somewhere, she knew, her mother was listening.
    Pulling out her phone, Penelope checked the local obituaries.
    No. There was no death notice for Joseph Bianchin. He might not be here . But he was alive somewhere.
    She sighed with relief, then brushed at her wet eyes. She shouldn’t be surprised that her mind had jumped in that fatal direction. For far too long, she’d been surrounded by death in all its forms.
    It was hard to be alone.
    Squaring her shoulders, she made a new plan.
    The thing was… all those years ago, when she left Bella Terra, she hadn’t truly understood how she had come to be there in the first place. Now she knew.
    Now she wondered whether she could ever forgive her mother. For anything. For everything.
    Bella Terra wasn’t huge. About forty thousand people—and in the wine-growing season, a whole lot of tourists—so Penelope would be able to find someone who could tell her where Joseph Bianchin was hiding.
    As she turned away, she cast a last wistful, resentful glance toward the house—and saw a flash at the upstairs window.
    She turned back and stared.
    Was someone watching her?
    But nothing stirred, not even the leaves on the live oak trees.
    Maybe it had been the reflection of a bird’s white wing.
    Maybe she had imagined it.
    Maybe Joseph Bianchin was skulking in his house and refusing to speak to her.
    But that made no sense at all. He had no idea who she was—why wouldn’t he