The second time was my funeral. Before my body was cold in the ground, before the last handful of earth had settled over my coffin, Salvatore Monreale dropped to one knee in front of my open grave and proposed to Rosalia. He turned my death into a spectacle. My entire existence into a joke told over glasses of Barolo at someone else's feast.
The memory of that life surged through me like ice water, and I turned to my Nonna in a panic. Her breathing had gone shallow and ragged, her thin chest rising and falling too fast. Her eyes, still sharp even at her age, had gone red and glassy as she stared at the photographs splayed across the floor in front of her.
"My Seraphina." Her voice cracked like old wood. "She would never do such a thing."