prologue
21 years ago.
BLAISE AND LUCIANO DELUCA stood on one side of a double pane window. Tears streamed down the wife’s cheeks while her husband wore an expression void of all emotion. The constant beep! beep! beep! was the only thing that assured them their youngest daughter was still in fact alive. Wires monitored her vitals, an oxygen mask strapped to her face and liquids flowing peacefully through her intravenous therapy. The couple had been through their fair share of hardships, but watching their three week old day after day with no real progress was the hardest thing their family of eight had had to deal with. The other four DeLuca children were not yet old enough to understand why their baby sister wasn’t coming home, but they knew that something was wrong.
Doctor Andrew Rolland stood in the corner, a solemn look on his face, as he watched the infant girl. His emotional connection to the family made it that much harder to deliver the news. Visiting hours had ended fifteen minutes ago, but that wasn’t the reason he went to them. It seemed there was nothing wrong with Aida Rachel Celeste DeLuca. Her current condition was unexplainable. She was unexplainable. After mustering up enough courage he finally sauntered over to the couple he had met decades ago, when they lived in Italy. “I’m so sorry,” it was a whisper from the Doctor. “We’ve run every test we possibly can and everything has come back the way it should.”
“What can we do?” Rolland stared at Aida, his mind swirling with only a completely non medical answer.
Brown eyes shifted away from the baby and towards the couple, “pray.”
And pray they did.
