Marco disappeared into the study not long after the rain started. The sound of the sea had turned restless, waves breaking harder against the rocks below. I stayed in the living room, staring at the coffee that had long gone cold, listening to the muted echo of drawers opening, papers shifting, the occasional frustrated sigh that slipped past his restraint.
He was searching for ghosts — and part of me wasn't sure I wanted him to find any.
When I finally went to check on him, the room was a mess. Files, photographs, old notebooks — all spread across the desk like a map of the past neither of us had wanted to read.
Marco looked up as I entered, his hair falling into his eyes, jaw tight with focus. "You should be resting."
"I couldn't," I said quietly. "You found something, didn't you?"
He hesitated, then handed me a faded photo. Two men stood beside a car — one of them was unmistakably my father, younger, smiling. The other was Matteo Rossi.
"Your father and mine," Marco said, voice low. "They worked together. More than that — they were partners."
"Partners in what?"
"That's the part I'm still trying to understand." He turned the photo over, revealing a handwritten note on the back:
'Project Helius — Classified — 1997.'
The name sent a chill through me. "Project Helius?"
"I've seen that name before," Marco said, rifling through another folder. "My father's private files mentioned it, but he always locked them away. I thought it was just military intel, something from his service days. But this—" He laid out a document, lines of type blurred and redacted. "It wasn't government. It was off-record."
I leaned closer, my heart pounding as I scanned the words that weren't blacked out:
experimental subjects… bio-response tracking… protective asset: subject I.B.
I froze.
"Marco," I whispered. "That's my initials."
He looked up sharply. "It can't be."
I pointed at the line again, my voice trembling. "Protective asset. Subject I.B. That's me."
For a heartbeat, neither of us spoke. The rain outside grew louder, thrumming against the windows like warning drums.
Marco's hands clenched around the edge of the desk. "If this is true, your father didn't just leave to protect you — he left because someone was experimenting with something connected to you."
I felt dizzy, the words spinning in my head. "Experimenting? On what?"
He shook his head. "I don't know yet. But there's more here — coded names, coordinates, initials. And one recurring phrase…" He handed me a torn page.
Across it, in his father's handwriting, were three words underlined twice:
'The child survived.'
The air left my lungs. I could barely breathe.
"The child…" I whispered. "That was me?"
Marco's expression darkened, eyes full of questions he didn't dare ask. "Maybe. Or maybe there was someone else involved — someone your father was hiding."
I backed away, shaking my head. "No. No, this doesn't make sense. My father was just a journalist, Marco. He wasn't part of something like this."
"Then why did he know my father?" he asked, quietly but firmly. "Why did they share files labeled classified? Why did he write that letter?"
Lightning flashed beyond the window, illuminating the room in stark white. For a moment, Marco looked like his father — the same sharp angles, the same haunted eyes.
He reached for me, but this time, I didn't move away.
"I'll find out what Helius was," he said. "And what they did to you — or for you. Whatever this is, I won't let it hurt you again."
I swallowed hard, my voice barely a breath. "What if it already has?"
He didn't answer. He just pulled me into his arms, the rain drowning out everything else.
But in the silence beneath it, I could still hear the echo of those words repeating in my mind:
The child survived.
And somewhere deep inside, a part of me began to wonder — what exactly had I survived?