What They Buried

Noa Giannino doesn't cry. She doesn't fall apart, she doesn't ask for help, and she doesn't believe in looking back. What she believes in is work, routine, and the armor she's spent a lifetime building- one layer at a time, starting the day her mother walked out and never stopping.
Then Alice dies.
Alice Kensington - her best friend, her person, the only one who ever saw straight through the armor - is gone. And in her place she's left something else entirely: a letter, a plane ticket, and a trip meticulously planned from beyond the grave. Twenty-one days across Italy, every detail chosen with the precision of someone who knew exactly what she was doing.
What Alice didn't mention was that she booked two seats.
Rafe Kensington is everything Noa has spent years keeping at a careful distance - dangerous, brilliant, and carrying secrets she's only beginning to understand. He got a letter too. His says things Alice never told anyone. And it ends with five words that change everything:
Trust Noa. She'll know what to do.
But as they follow Alice's trail from Florence to Tuscany to the sun-bleached cliffs of the Amalfi Coast, what begins as grief becomes something darker. Alice wasn't just their best friend. She was building a case - against her own family, against the empire her blood built, against people who do not forgive and do not forget. She had a secret. She had a partner. And she had enemies who may not have been willing to wait for her illness to take her.
The closer Noa and Rafe get to the truth, the more the truth looks like something that was never meant to be found.
And the more Noa looks at Rafe - this man she shouldn't trust, this man Alice trusted completely, this man who shows up in shuttered villas and on moonlit terraces and looks at her like she's the only real thing in the room - the more she understands that some things are more dangerous than evidence.
Some things you can't take back.
Some people you can't walk away from.