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preschool.”
    Preschool? “No way.”
    “It’s not like it was when we were kids,” Rob said. “For any hope of getting a kid into a good college, you have to get them into a good private primary school first, and to do that they have to go to the right preschool.”
    Tony wasn’t even sure if he would want to put his child in private school. As a kid, he would have given anything to go to public school, if for no other reason than to have a little privacy, and anonymity. Any childhood mishaps or embarrassments had been fodder for the entire family. Every time he tried to shirk the rules, it always got back to his parents somehow. He’d had no choice but to behave. Not that he would have been a delinquent otherwise, but being the second oldest cousin—Nick’s sister Jessica beating him out by a year and a half—he’d been held to a higher standard his entire life.
    “They look up to you,” his dad used to tell him, and being the oldest of the three brothers, Antonio Sr. understood sacrifice. “It’s your responsibility to set a good example.”
    That’s how it was in the Caroselli family. No sacrifice was too large. Working for Caroselli Chocolate hadn’t been Tony’s first choice as a career. It hadn’t been his second or third, either, but he fell in line, because that was what families did. Or so he used to think. He was getting tired of playing by their rules.
    He was inching closer to forty every day. When did he get to start living his life the way he wanted to? When he was Nonno ’sage?
    “I think Lucy and I will just have to take this one day at a time,” he told his cousins. “Which would be much easier to do if everyone would just give us the time and the space we need to figure this out.”
    “Everyone means well,” Nick said.
    That didn’t change the fact that they were only making things more stressful.
    “There’s another matter we came to talk to you about,” Rob said. “We have concerns about Rose.”
    Rose Goldwyn, the daughter of Nonno ’s secretary, had come to them last fall looking for a job. Because of her mother, Phyllis’s, twenty-plus years of dedicated service to Caroselli Chocolate, they’d felt obligated to hire her. Unfortunately, Rose was nothing like her mother. She did her job, but unlike Phyllis, who had been like a part of the Caroselli family until she retired, Rose didn’t fit in. There was something about her that just seemed a little...off. Lately Tony had come to realize that it was an opinion shared by a good majority of the family, and most of her coworkers.
    “Megan pulled me aside yesterday,” Rob told him. Megan, Rob’s younger sister, had just bought her first home and brought Rose in as her roommate. “She said she’s a little creeped out by Rose’s recent behavior.”
    “ Recent behavior? She’s creeped me out since the day she was hired,” Nick said. He was one of those guys who got along with practically everyone. If he thought something was off about Rose, they would be wise to listen.
    “Meg said that Rose seems unusually interested in the family,” Rob told them. “She asks a lot of questions about Nonno and Nonna. ”
    “What kind of questions?” Tony asked.
    “What they were like, did they have a good marriage?”
    That was odd. “What does she care about our grandparents’ marriage? How could that possibly be relevant to her?”
    “It gets stranger. She asked if Meg had any old family movies.”
    “I suppose this would be a good time to mention that Terri and I caught her coming from the direction of Nonno ’s study on the day of our wedding,” Nick said. “Rose claimed she was looking for the bathroom and got lost, but then she scurried down the stairs without using the bathroom. I figured she was just nervous being at a family function for the first time. It can be a little overwhelming for an outsider. But Terri was convinced that she was lying.”
    Rob muttered a curse. “A couple of months ago Carrie caught