Chapter 1 - The Ghost in the Ledger
The bell above the bakery door chimed, cutting through the heavy silence left by Adrien Moretti’s departure. Lena let out a long, shuddering breath, her fingers still resting on the glass counter where the blank check had been.
Outside, the two black SUVs pulled away from the curb, blending into the sluggish Chicago traffic like sharks sinking beneath murky water.
"Lena," her assistant, Chloe, whispered from the doorway of the back kitchen, clutching a bag of flour to her chest as if it were a shield. "Was that... was that him? Was that the Moretti guy?"
"Get back to work, Chloe," Lena muttered, though her own heart was still hammering against her ribs.
She picked up the untouched slice of orange almond cake and carried it back to the kitchen. Her mind raced. Twenty-two years ago. Teresa Moretti. The dates didn't make sense, or perhaps they made too much sense. Lena’s own grandmother, Clara, had never spoken much about her life before she settled in Illinois, but she had left behind a heavy, leather-bound recipe book with water-stained pages and handwritten notes in the margins—notes written in a sharp, elegant Italian script.
Lena went to her locker, pulled out her canvas tote bag, and retrieved the old journal. She flipped to the back pages, past the sourdough starters and the apple tart variations, searching for the orange almond cake.
May you like
There it was. But beneath the recipe, written in a different, more frantic handwriting—her mother’s hand—was a footnote: Protect this. They are looking for the recipe, not the paper. If they find it, everything we built in Sicily is gone.
Lena’s breath caught. Her family hadn't just baked for a living. They had hidden.
