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I turn back to the window and think about Sophia Marchelli. Twenty-seven. MBA in finance.

She’s a loose end. She’s a risk. She’s a problem I need to solve before she becomes one I can’t.

Chapter Two

Sophia

Istand in the doorway of my father’s apartment longer than I need to. I just can’t make myself walk in.

When I lived at home, this place was loud. Garlic on the stove. Books stacked where they didn’t belong. My father arguing with someone on the phone in Italian even though he only switched languages when he wanted to be dramatic. Now it feels like a place I’m not sure I have the right to disturb.

Eventually, I tell myself to stop being dramatic and step inside.

Everything is exactly where it should be. Which somehow makes it worse. His leather chair is by the window. The bookshelves are crammed with Italian cookbooks and crime novels he thought I didn’t know about. The framed photo of my mother is still on the side table.

I drop my keys into the ceramic bowl by the door and hear the lock catch behind me with a heavy mechanical click. Three locks in total. I used to make fun of him for that. Now I’m beginning to wonder if my father was paranoid or just annoyingly right about everything.

I set my suitcase by the couch and walk through to the kitchen. The sandalwood candle is still on the windowsill, burned down to a nub. His coffee cup is in the drying rack. He must have washed it that morning. The morning of the heart attack. The morning he got up, made coffee, drank it, washed the cup, and then died on the kitchen floor.

I press my palm against the counter and breathe through the tightness in my throat. I didn’t come here to cry. I came here to close accounts and sign papers and clear out Dad’s apartment and move forward with my life. His lease runs out in a week. Seven more days to sort through the last pieces of his life, hand over the keys, and figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do with mine.

I have an MBA I haven’t used and a savings account that’s getting thinner every month and grief that sits heavy on my chest.

Six months of being frozen. Six months of not being able to job hunt, not being able to eat right, not being able to think about anything except the phone call from his neighbor, “I’m so sorry, honey, he’s gone, they tried everything,“ and the flight to Chicago to collect his ashes and the flight back home and the silence.

I’m done being frozen. I start in the bedroom.

The dresser is wrong. The top drawer isn’t fully closed. My father was meticulous. Everything in its place, every surface clean, every drawer shut. He ironed his undershirts. He alphabetized his spice rack. He did not leave drawers open.

I pull it out all the way and look inside. His clothes are there but they’ve been moved. The neat folded stacks are disrupted, edges uneven, a sock balled up instead of paired. Someone went through this drawer and tried to put everything back the way they found it. They did a decent job. But I grew up watching my father fold laundry like it was a form of art, and this isn’t his work.

My heartbeat picks up. I move to the next drawer. Same thing. Subtle displacement, his careful order disturbed. The closet. His suits are still hanging but they’re not in the right order. He kept them by color, dark to light. Someone’s rehung them without knowing the system.

I go back to the living room and look again, harder this time. The books on the top shelf are slightly uneven: pulled out and replaced. The rug by the front door is crooked. And in the corner of the room, behind his chair, the floorboard is different from the others. Newer. Like it was pried up and nailed back down.

I stand in the middle of my dead father’s apartment and feel the cold thread in my chest pull tighter.

Someone searched this place. Someone who knew what they were doing and wanted it to look undisturbed. If I were anyone else, if I didn’t have his eye for detail, his obsessive need for order running through my DNA, I wouldn’t have noticed.

But I’m his daughter.

I pull out my phone and almost call the police. My thumb hovers over the nine. Then I stop.

My father spent my entire childhood keeping me at arm’s length from his work. He ran a restaurant in a neighborhood where the men who ate there had drivers and bodyguards and eyes that went flat when they looked at you. Some spoke flawless English. Others carried heavy accents and switched into Russian when they didn’t want the waitstaff following the conversation. As a kid, I thought it was just another language drifting through a Chicago restaurant.

He never talked about the business side. He never brought anyone home. The one time I asked him, at sixteen, who the men in the suits were, he put down his fork and looked at me and said, “Sophia, some doors you don’t open. Not because they’re locked. Because what’s behind them doesn’t let you leave once you step through.”

I didn’t ask again.

But I knew. I knew the way you know something you’ve never been told. By the shape of the silence around it. My father was connected. Whatever he did beyond cooking and hosting, it wasn’t the kind of work you report to the police.

So if someone searched his apartment after he died, the police aren’t who I should be talking to.

I put my phone away and start looking for what they were trying to find.

It takes me three hours. I almost miss it.

His winter coat. The heavy wool one he wore from November to March, the one that smells like him, like cedar and coffee and the faintest trace of cigarette smoke he thought I didn’t know about. I grab it from the closet to bring it to my face, to breathe him in one more time, and I feel something stiff in the lining.