“Is Lily sleepy, too?” Gabriel asked, winking hopefully at Kim, but the little girl shook her head and continued to play.

Kim was still distracted and a few minutes later Gabriel repeated the question he’d asked on their arrival a few days before. “What’s going on? You’re miles away.”

“Nothing,” she continued to lie. She wanted to stop, but telling the truth was proving more difficult than she’d imagined.

He sighed. “You’re not being truthful, though, are you?” he said, and Kim’s heart jumped into her chest. “I know you said you’d have some time to spend with us before everything kicked off, but maybe that was too optimistic.”

“No, honestly, it’s fine.” She refreshed her email again, waiting on more news from Hank, but nothing.

Her mind automatically traveled back to that day she found the journal behind the dresser, and she racked her brains to think who the real owner could possibly be and why they’d chosen now to come out of the woodwork.

Well, she could hazard a guess as to why: it was the perfect opportunity to sabotage the launch and publicly humiliate her in the process—which suggested it had to be personal. The timing was too coincidental for it not to be.

So who was this person? A past guest of the villa would surely have long forgotten about it, or if not, would have recognized or identified Kim’s usage of various quotes and ideas before now.

It couldn’t have been the villa’s previous owner either, because when Antonio had made them an offer to buy it, the family seemed more than happy to have somebody actually pay them to take the ramshackle estate off their hands.

Unless it was a disgruntled relative? Who knew how these family things could go?

But there was little point in Kim trying to figure this out herself, she knew. She had to wait until she heard more from Hank and hope against hope that he could make this go away.

“I want to get down,” Lily complained, and Gabriel temporarily released his arm from Kim to lower their daughter to the ground.

As always, the moment Lily’s feet touched earth she was on the move. Like most three-year-olds she was fearless.

Now, she raced toward the three statues that stood sentinel in the town square. Two of them had no arms and Kim thought Lily might be frightened by that, but nope. She walked right up to the base of the stand on which they stood and stared up, first at one and then the other. She turned to the third. It had the body of a man with small wings and no head.

“Daddy, why are some parts missing?” she asked as she began to move around the stands. “Can we find them?”