The Daughter They Erased Came Back Untouchable novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Thirty-Two Voice Notes

My aunt found Fiammetta in the corridor outside the dining room, and she was crying too hard to whisper.

"The phone was never in her room," she said. "We took the whole room apart. Your uncle looked in the mattress, and in her shoes, and he made me look in her hair."

"Why are you telling me?" Fiammetta said.

"Because she's dead, and I helped, and I can't sleep."

My aunt wiped her face with her wrist and walked away down the corridor without another word.

Fiammetta turned to me.

"She hid it somewhere none of them would think of."

I thought of Nonna in the last summer before the fall, sitting in the piano room with her tea while I practiced.

I thought of a hollow under the lid of the piano bench, where I used to hide sweets from my governess.

Nonna had known about it from the first week.

"Come," I said.

We ran up the back stairs, Fiammetta, Gaetano, Hanna and I.

The piano room still held my camp bed, and the old bench stood under the window with its lid shut.

I knelt and felt along the underside of the lid with my fingertips.

There was a flat panel of felt I had never noticed.

Behind it lay a small black phone wrapped in one of Nonna's lace handkerchiefs.

I did not breathe.

"It's dead," Gaetano said, taking it from me.

"I have a charger," said Hanna. "I always have a charger. In Switzerland it is called being prepared."

She plugged it into the wall and we all stared at the black screen, and nobody spoke.

It lit up.

It asked for a code.

"Try the year," Gaetano said.

"Try her birthday."

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