Chapter 50 A Ghost From The Past

• (POV: Isabela)
• The day before the wedding. It felt quiet. Too quiet. Like the still air right before a huge, terrible storm hits. A strange, heavy quiet settled over Mateo’s Miami fortress. The staff, always so hushed and fast, were extra still today. As if they were scared to breathe. And me? I felt like I was sleepwalking. Tomorrow, I would be Isabela Castillo. Tomorrow. The last tiny bit of my old self, my old world, would be wiped out forever.
• Mateo, in a rare and unexpected moment of… what? Generosity? Calculated manipulation? – had allowed one of my small requests from our ‘negotiation’ days ago. Through Mrs. Davenport, he’d had several sealed boxes brought to my suite. They contained some of my mother’s personal belongings, things that had been packed away after her death, things Papa, in his grief and then his decline, had never touched.