The car was black, discreet, and far too punctual.
At exactly nine, Lina saw the sedan pull up in front of the studio building. No honk, no phone call. Just sitting there, waiting, as if it knew she would be watching from the window.
And she was.
She went downstairs with her tool bag slung over her shoulder—the same one she took to every field assessment. Inside were precision scalpels, magnifying glasses, tweezers, cotton gloves, and a humidity meter. Everything organized with a surgeon's precision.
The driver got out and opened the rear door without saying a word. Dark suit, dark sunglasses, clenched jaw. He looked more like a security guard than a chauffeur.
“Good morning,” Lina said.
He nodded. Nothing more.
*Great. Stimulating conversation.*
The drive lasted forty minutes. They left downtown, crossed neighborhoods Lina knew well, then turned onto streets she had never seen. The buildings grew farther apart, the walls taller, the gates heavier. Security cameras appeared at regular intervals, almost hidden among the ivy and stone.
When the car finally stopped, Lina needed a moment to process what she was seeing.
It wasn't an office. It wasn't a bank. It was an estate—a villa surrounded by immaculate gardens, with a pale stone facade that looked as if it had been torn from another century. Two men in suits flanked the main entrance, standing like statues.
*What kind of client needs bodyguards to protect a diary?*
Aldo Ferraris was waiting for her in the entrance hall. He was shorter than his voice on the phone had suggested—a middle-aged man with slicked-back gray hair, an immaculate suit, and a smile that never reached his eyes.
“Ms. Marchetti. Thank you for coming.”
“Thank you for sending the car,” Lina replied without smiling. “Although I still prefer to drive myself.”
Ferraris ignored the comment with practiced elegance.
“This way, please.”
He led her down a long corridor with marble floors and walls covered in paintings that made Lina slow her pace. A Caravaggio. Or an extraordinary copy. Beside it was something that looked like an Artemisia Gentileschi—the brushwork was unmistakable, that contained fury in the paint.
“They’re authentic,” Ferraris said, noticing her gaze. “My client is an admirer.”
*Admirer.* Lina filed the word away. People who collected originals of this caliber weren’t merely admirers. They owned fortunes that didn’t appear on any public list.
They descended a stone staircase into a climate-controlled basement. The temperature dropped noticeably. The air had that dry, controlled quality Lina recognized—a professional conservation environment. Whoever owned the place knew what they were doing.
The room was small, lit by cool, diffuse light. In the center, on a stainless-steel table covered with a linen cloth, lay the diary.
Lina felt her heart begin to race.
It was smaller than she’d expected. The dark leather cover was aged, marked by pressure and moisture. The edges were worn, and the metal clasp—bronze, perhaps—had oxidized until it was almost unrecognizable.
She set her bag on the auxiliary table, put on her gloves, and moved closer.
“May I?” she asked, more out of habit than necessity.
Ferraris nodded.
Lina opened the diary with the delicacy of someone opening a wound. The first page was stained, the ink faded into shades of sepia and rust. The handwriting was tiny, slanted to the right, written in haste or fear—perhaps both.
She turned the pages slowly. Some were stuck together by moisture. Others had tears along the edges. But the overall structure was salvageable. She could already visualize the process: separating the pages with controlled steam, stabilizing the paper with methylcellulose, reinforcing the spines.
Then she stopped.
On page seventeen—or what remained of it—there was something different. The ink changed. Not the color, but the pattern. At first glance, the letters looked the same, but the spacing was far too irregular to be carelessness. There was a logic there, hidden among the words.
Lina knew what she was looking at. She had seen it in Renaissance manuscripts—coded messages, codes embedded in the text like invisible veins beneath the skin.
She said nothing. She simply closed the diary carefully and turned to Ferraris.
“The material is salvageable. It will take time”—six to eight weeks, depending on the condition of the inner pages. “I need to work at my studio, with my equipment.”
“That can be arranged,” Ferraris said. “On one condition: the diary does not leave this estate.”
Lina crossed her arms.
“Then I need to bring my equipment here.”
“We’ll provide a suitable workspace.”
She looked around. The basement, the climate control, the guards, the car without a license plate. All of it was excessive for a diary, no matter how old it was.
“Mr. Ferraris,” she said, meeting his gaze. “What exactly is in this diary that justifies all this?”
His smile faltered for a fraction of a second. So quickly that most people wouldn’t have noticed. But Lina had spent her entire life looking for details most people didn’t notice.
“History, Ms. Marchetti. Nothing but history.”
*Lie,* Lina thought. But she didn’t say it.
She shook his hand, confirmed that she would return the next morning with her equipment, and followed the silent driver back to the car.
Throughout the drive back, she remained silent, watching the city pass by outside the window. But her mind was on page seventeen. On that pattern that wasn’t an accident. On that ink hiding something someone, decades ago, had gone to the trouble of encoding.
And on the previous restorer. The one who had *given up*.
Lina picked up her phone and typed the name into the search bar: the last restorer Ferraris had mentioned. She needed to find out who he was. And why he had abandoned the work.
The screen loaded. And the first result made her stomach drop.
It wasn’t an article about giving up.
It was an obituary.