Hours before proposing to a polished corporate match I didn't love, four six-year-old boys walked into a Back Bay restaurant bathroom and shattered my entire reality.

A ghost.

The word rattled through Dominic’s chest, bitter and hollow. He wasn't the one looking at a ghost; he was the ghost, haunting a room where he had no right to be, looking at four living miracles that should never have existed in the cold geometry of his life.

Dominic swallowed hard, his throat dry as desert sand. He tried to muster the voice that commanded capos and silenced prosecutors, but when he parted his lips, what emerged was a fractured, unsteady whisper—a sound so raw and broken that he hardly recognized it as his own.

"I..." Dominic began, his deep baritone catching on the single syllable. He cleared his throat, but the trembling in his chest refused to subside. He looked into the eyes of the boy closest to him—the one with the hair gesture, the one who held himself with an innate, quiet authority that marked him as the oldest by minutes.

Dominic reached up, his hand hovering near the boy's small shoulder before he forced his fingers to drop back to his knee, unwilling to frighten them with his rough, calloused touch. His heart was beating so violently in his ears that he could barely hear the soft drip of water from the brass faucet behind them.

"How old are you?" Dominic asked.

The question was barely three words, but it carried the weight of an entire lifetime. It was the only question that mattered. It was the mathematical key to the labyrinth that had trapped his soul for seventy-two months.

The boy who had washed his hands stepped forward, drying his palms on the clean towel, his small chest puffing out beneath the ivory blazer with childish pride. He stood tall, his little black shoes clicking sharply against the polished beige marble.

"We're six," the boy declared proudly, holding up his right hand and spreading all five fingers, then quickly thrusting his left index finger into the air to complete the tally. "We had our birthday last month! In September!"

Six.

September.

The world went violently, terrifyingly white behind Dominic’s eyes.

The breath was sucked from his lungs as if he had been struck in the solar plexus with an iron bat. His broad shoulders seized, locking into place. The four boys watched him, their small faces tilting in collective, innocent confusion as the tall man in the dark suit seemed to turn into a statue carved from granite.

September. Six years ago.

Dominic’s mind raced backward through time with the speed of an incoming bullet. September of that bloody, cursed year. The North End war had reached its fever pitch. The car bomb on Hanover Street. The death threats delivered to his townhouse. The night he had stood in the rain outside Clara’s apartment, lying through his teeth, telling her that he was done with her, that he didn't love her, that she was merely a distraction he was discarding—all to force her onto a flight out of the country, away from the crosshairs that were painted on his back.

She had stood in the doorway of her brownstone, her face pale, her beautiful brown eyes drowning in unshed tears, her fingers digging into the fabric of her coat. She had not screamed; she had simply looked at him with an agony that had haunted him every night since.

He had calculated that she would be safe in Europe. He had planned to finish the war, eliminate the traitors, and spend the rest of his life begging on his knees for her forgiveness. But when the smoke cleared three months later, she had vanished. Her accounts were closed. Her family home in Concord was sold. She had erased herself from the earth so thoroughly that even the Moretti intelligence apparatus—an empire of wiretaps and paid informants—had come back with empty hands.