We circle the ditch, which caves to a point like the inside of a cone. At the center, a swatch of dirty cloth comes up like a weed. Ray scrapes around it. It’s too dark to see the color, but the hand-stitched lace inset is unmistakably Colonia.

Despite his leg injury, Massimo jumps in the hole and digs around the cloth, while the question I’ve been afraid to ask runs over and over in my head.

Are you my mother?

Is she buried? Or enslaved somewhere far away, stripped of everything, living without living? I can’t bear either option.

Massimo finds hair. Pale brown like my mother’s.

Ray finds a shoe on the breaking bones of a foot.

“Fuck you,” my brother curses with effort, getting on his hands and knees to dig with his hands. “Fuck you forever, you animal.”

“No.” My denial is a whisper.

This is all meaningless. It could be anyone. I can’t say it, because I don’t want it proven.

Are you my mother?

I have to say it, because I need to know the nature of my love.

“Check the back collar,” I say. Massimo looks up at me. “For the cherries.”

He takes too long to figure out what I’m saying. I jump into the hole, then recoil from what I intended to do. It stinks down here. My stomach lurches from the smell and the thought of touching a decaying body.

“Get out,” Massimo growls.

I have to do it. Dario would. To save me, he’d swim a river of shit. Now I have to save him and prove this isn’t my mother.

“No.” I get on my knees in the mud and touch the back of the collar. The head drops off. I sob in fear and disgust, then turn out the back neck.

A tab pops out. Covered in brown death and disintegrating in my fingers, I can still see what once was three bright red cherries.

This is my mother, rotting.

“No!” I drop the dress. I wish she was some sick man’s slave, and I’m glad she’s dead, and I wish I could find her, and I don’t.

Dario lied when he said she was alive, then he made me fall in love with him without telling me what he didn’t know. He didn’t care about anything but controlling me.

He painted a picture for me. Dario Lucari—savior of oppressed women. Sainted survivor. Monster with a heart of gold.

Liar.

My breath hitches in a sob, and the dam that held back my sorrow bursts. Are you my mother Are you my mother are you my motherareyoumymothermothermother?

“That’s it.” Sergio claps his hands together once. “This is done. Lucari can’t live. When he’s dead, I marry the princess over here.”

Massimo tries to get out of the hole but barks in pain and drops back.