They spoke as if all these questions were not quickly eroding their faith in what they had to do. But they both knew they had to set their misgivings aside. If even a single member of the team were to express any uncertainty about their chances of success, their doubt would spread like a disease and weaken the chain that was meant to stretch all the way across the valley and over the mountains, until it reached the child and brought him home. And Teresa needed every single link in that chain to hold.

She turned to Marini.

“We’ll find him,” she said.

He gave her a brisk, decisive nod. He understood.

Teresa picked up her diary. She had to keep taking notes, even though it felt like a hindrance sometimes—a waste of time, even. If she wanted to understand how her mind was deteriorating and at what rate, she had to be methodical about things, set herself rules and stick to them. It was only thanks to those notes that she’d managed to remember how she’d hurt her hand. But she refused to believe she could already be at the stage where she was forgetting her own life, and she desperately tried to convince herself that it was all down to how exhausted she was.

She held the notebook in her hands, her eyes scanning the last few things she’d written. They were little more than scribbles jotted down in the moments between wakefulness and sleep.

She couldn’t remember them. She had no memory of those words. It felt strange to read them now, as if they belonged to someone else who lived inside of her. But that person was trying to help her.

“Is something wrong?” Marini asked her.

“Many things, but not what’s in here,” she replied, feeling a smile forming on her face. Her heart was beating faster. For the first time, she did not feel scared of what was happening to her.

“The children,” she said. Those were the last words she’d written down before falling asleep.

“I don’t understand.”

She hadn’t either, at the beginning, but now she felt like she could see what had finally clicked in her mind right before she had fallen asleep.

“Looks like I’ve been working a few things out in my sleep,” she told him as she closed the diary. “The first victim is Diego Valent’s father. The second is Lucia Kravina’s mother. I imagine Diego and Lucia must be classmates.”

“There can’t be more than one class per grade, in Travenì. Do you think there’s a link? But the kid who was attacked in the forest isn’t connected.”

“Abramo Viesel was the janitor of the school. Diego told us he was mean to his friend.”

“The baby that’s been kidnapped has an older brother. His name is Mathias. He’s the same age as Diego and Lucia, too,” said Marini.