I faltered, my words catching in my throat. She fell in love with a mafioso.

Was that really so hard to believe?

No. It was easy to understand. Too easy.

I turned back to my search. ‘You were supposed to tell me everything after Donata left yesterday,’ I said. ‘She was sure you would.’

‘I know,’ she conceded.

‘And you didn’t.’

She raked her hands through her hair, greasy tendrils swiping across her forehead. ‘I didn’t know what to do, Sophie. Your father made me swear to him that I’d never reveal it. That I’d hide it with every last breath. But then … Jack got in hot water and he went to … he went to Donata, of all people, and he broke open the secret. And suddenly she had her eyes on you. She knew who you were. She said she was allowing me the courtesy of telling you. I told her I would.’

‘You really thought you could hide it from me?’ I asked her.

‘I had to try,’ she said, her words cracking. ‘I had to try.’

‘What were you afraid of?’ I asked, feeling marginally less angry now. It wasn’t so hard to understand my mother’s position. No wonder she hadn’t been coping well. She was chewing on a secret so big it was destroying her. ‘Telling me wouldn’t have ended the world.’

She shook her head. ‘You can’t bury something if you keep digging it up. We had to keep going, keep living the life we’d made. I was afraid you would go to them. That they would pull you in and you would see a family with money and protection and support, a family you never really had. And then Jack cut us off and the bills started piling up, and when Donata came I thought she would tell you, and you would leave me for betraying you.’

I reached down and clasped her hand. ‘I would never leave you!’

‘I wanted to do the right thing, the best thing …’ She shook her head, her expression filling with sadness. ‘But I couldn’t tell what it was, Sophie.’

‘What do you mean, Jack cut us off?’

‘Jack handles the diner money,’ she said. ‘He’s stopped sending us our share, and you weren’t well enough to go to work. I’ve been too frazzled to finish my own projects … and …’

‘I would have gone back, Mom. You should have told me sooner.’

‘Your health is more important to me.’

I rose on to my tiptoes and returned to my search, feeling a mixture of triumph and fear as my fingers brushed against something hard and dusty at the back of the closet. I pulled the box out, balancing it carefully as I heaved it down. I climbed off the chair and dropped it on the bed.

‘Sweetheart …’ she began, ‘I think we should take this slow …’

I opened the box and dumped its contents on to the bed. ‘We don’t have time for “slow”.’

My father’s past fluttered on to the duvet.

‘God,’ I breathed, as I picked up the yellowed birth certificate from Northwestern Memorial Hospital and read the faded writing.

Vincenzo Alessio Marino

D.O.B: 12th of September, 1971

Father: Vincenzo Carmine Marino

Mother: Linda Mary Harris

I brushed my thumb over my father’s birthdate.

My father, Vincenzo Marino Jr.

I swallowed hard.

My eye fell on a newspaper clipping. I picked it up; the article was marked 14th November 1987. I scanned it, trying to detach myself from the gruesomeness, from how close to home it really was.

TWO DEAD IN MOB HIT. THE BLOOD

FEUD CONTINUES.

The bodies of Vincenzo Marino, Mafia boss of the Marino crime family, and his wife, Linda Harris, were discovered in their home in Hyde Park yesterday afternoon. They had been shot execution-style. Their sons, Vincenzo Jr and Antony were not on the premises at the time of the shooting.

Vincenzo Marino was born in Sicily, but relocated to Chicago with his family when he was a young teenager. Linda Harris was a Wisconsin native of Irish descent, who had studied art in New York before she met and married the infamous Mafia don.

Head of an organization nicknamed the Black Hand Mob, Vincenzo Marino was widely referred to as the ‘Iron Hand’ due to the successful steel business he owned and operated with his brothers. Gangland rivalry is suspected to be involved in the killing, with a source close to the FBI pointing to the rival Falcone crime family as having carried out the double hit.

The Marino deaths are the latest in a series of Mafia-related killings and disappearances over the last year. The suspected blood feud has claimed the lives of eleven Falcones and sixteen Marinos since its eruption. The investigation continues.

Beneath the article, there was a grainy photograph of Vincenzo Marino and his wife, Linda Harris. My grandparents. They were dressed formally and smiling at something off camera. She was beautiful. He looked just like my father. In all my life, I had only ever seen one picture of them – a holiday snap from when my father was a child. He said the other pictures were too painful for him to look at. But now they were spread out below me, tens of Polaroids of the Marino boss and his wife, of Jack and my father, smiling and laughing, wearing silly hats and blowing out candles and doing all the normal things that normal happy families do. These were not deadbeat parents, the way I’d always been told.

‘Where were Dad and Jack?’ I asked, sifting through the photographs. ‘The article says they weren’t in the house when they were killed.’

I was all too aware of my mother hovering behind me, her heavy breathing filling up the silence. She was panicking and trying not to show it; I was trying not to scream at her. It was a delicate dance.