Giulia woke at seven, same as every morning. Shower, coffee, a cookie eaten standing over the sink. Annalisa was already in the kitchen, sitting at the table with both hands wrapped around her mug, her gaze fixed somewhere beyond the window.
"Dad?" Giulia asked.
"He went to Baggiovara last night. Luca was in an accident."
Giulia set down the cookie. "Luca? How is he?"
"He's in a coma."
The word hung in the kitchen air, between the smell of coffee and the hum of the refrigerator. Giulia had known Luca since she was a little girl. He was the one who brought her chocolates at Christmas, the one who made her laugh doing impressions of drivers on the radio, the one who had taken her to see the Fiorano circuit once and told her: *See, Giulia? This is where the future gets built.*
"Where's Dad now?"
"He said he had to go to Vignola. He didn't explain why."
Giulia looked at her mother. Annalisa had that set to her lips that meant: *I know your father is doing something dangerous and I can't stop him.*
"I'm going to the office," Giulia said. "If Dad calls, let me know."
Annalisa nodded without looking at her.
The office was in Maranello, on a side street off Via Claudia. A consulting firm — four desks, a filing cabinet nobody ever reorganized, and a coffee machine that sounded like a tractor. Giulia sat down at her workstation, turned on her computer, opened her email.
Thirty-two messages. Invoices, notices, the usual newsletter from the accountant. And one with no subject line.
Sender: an address she'd never seen before. A string of numbers and letters, no name.
She opened it.
Four lines. No signature, no header, no greeting.
*Giulia Malaguti. Warehouse 7, the industrial district of Fiorano Modenese. Thursday at 9 p.m. Bring the documents. Don't talk to anyone.*
Giulia read it twice. Then a third time.
What documents?
She looked around. Her coworkers were talking to each other, one laughing on the phone, the other typing away. Everything normal. Everything the same as always. But those four lines on the screen were not normal. Not even close.
She picked up her phone. Found her father's number. Then stopped.
*Don't talk to anyone.*
She put the phone down. Her hands were trembling, just barely — just enough to notice. Who knew her name? Who knew where she worked? And more than anything: what documents?
She didn't have any documents. She knew nothing about engines, projects, engineers. She was an office worker. She handled invoices, deadlines, paperwork. She had nothing to do with her father's world, with Luca, with whatever had happened last night on the road to Castelvetro.
And yet someone thought otherwise.
She closed the email. Opened it again. Read it again. Checked the clock in the bottom right corner of the screen. Thursday was the day after tomorrow.
Renzo came home in the early afternoon. He had the face of a man who hadn't slept and had no plans to. He sat down at the kitchen table and Annalisa set a plate of tortellini in front of him, which he stared at without touching.
"Omar knows something," he said. "I'm sure of it. He's scared. Someone frightened him."
"Renzo, this isn't a courtroom case. If there are dangerous people involved—"
"Luca is in a coma, Annalisa. My best friend is in a coma and someone took documents from him worth billions. I can't sit here eating tortellini and pretend everything's fine."
Annalisa didn't answer. She picked up the plate and put it back in the refrigerator. She didn't slam anything, didn't raise her voice. But the silence she left in the kitchen was heavier than any words.
Giulia got home at six. She found her father in the study, sitting at his desk with his phone in one hand and a legal pad covered in names and arrows.
"Dad."
Renzo looked up. "Hey, sweetheart. Did you hear about Luca?"
"Yeah, Mom told me."
Giulia sat down in the chair across from the desk. The same chair where she used to sit as a little girl doing homework while her father worked. Now she sat in it with a secret burning in her pocket like a live coal.
She wanted to tell him. She wanted to pull out her phone, show him the email, say: *Dad, someone wrote to me, told me to go to a warehouse in Fiorano with documents I don't have.*
But she didn't.
She didn't know why. Maybe because her father already had enough to deal with. Maybe because that line — *don't talk to anyone* — had lodged itself in her head like a nail. Maybe because some part of her, some small and foolish and brave part, wanted to figure out on her own what was happening.
"You okay?" Renzo asked, watching her with those lawyer's eyes that saw everything.
"Yeah, Dad. I'm fine."
And for the first time in her life, Giulia lied to her father.
That night she didn't sleep. She lay in bed with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the house. The radiator ticking. The wind outside. Her father pacing back and forth in the study downstairs.
Thursday was tomorrow.
And she still hadn't decided what to do.