Chapter 27
Luca
He has packed light. One bag, as always.
The laptop. The notebook with the recipe folded into the back pages — he will make copies, he has told himself, and hasn’t yet, because copying it would make it feel like evidence and he doesn’t want it to be that.
He wants it to be what it is: a piece of paper with handwriting on it in two languages, found in a room in the dark.
The bag is by the door.
He stands in the kitchen doorway and looks at it and thinks: when I’m back.
He has been thinking this since yesterday.
Since this morning. There are things he should say — he knows exactly what they are, he has known for weeks — and he is not going to say them now, in the middle of a morning that already has too much in it. After he’s back. That’s when.
It’s a clean logic. He’s aware it is also a postponement.
Matej appears with one AirPod in — the left one, always the left — and just surfacing, it seems, from forty minutes of internal monologue. He looks at the bag. Looks at Luca.
“The Bora,” he says, “is technically a katabatic wind.”
Luca waits.
“Means it falls. Gravity pulls it down off the plateau.” The fact arrives fully formed, without preamble, the internal paragraph that preceded it invisible to everyone but him. “Most people think it blows in from the sea. It doesn’t. It falls.”
“Dan Carlin?”
“Meteorology podcast.” He takes the AirPod out. “Anyway.”
“Anyway,” Luca agrees.
Matej is in the kitchen moving through the morning without speaking until there is coffee.
Luca has learned not to interpret this as anything other than what it is: sequence, not distance.
First the kettle. Then the cups. Then the window.
He checks the yard every morning without seeming to decide to.
This morning the sequence is the same. Matej’s jaw is doing the thing.
Luca sits at the table and watches him.
“A week,” Luca says.
“You said.”
“Editor first. Then the apartment — collect the rest of my things. Then back.”
Matej sets the cups down. Doesn’t say anything.
“You don’t have to —” Luca starts.
“I know.”
“I mean the timeline. If the roads —”
“I know,” Matej says again. He sits down across from him. Puts his hands around his cup. “I’m not worried about the roads.”
The Bora presses against the windows, low and steady.
Outside the yard is grey and cold, the kind of morning that looks the same whether it’s eight or eleven.
The cave entrance is just visible from the window — Luca has started to notice it the way you notice a thing that has become part of how you read a place.
He thinks about Christmas. Matej will be here. He will be in Milan in an apartment with no food in it. The timing is what it is; he has decided not to make it into a thing.
It is, of course, already a thing. He has been, quietly, catastrophising. Just a little.
He knows exactly what he could say. He closes his hands around his cup instead.
“There’s a wheel coming ready mid-week,” Matej says. “Nine months. The one I did differently.”
Luca looks at him. He knows this wheel. Nine months in the cave, the one Matej did differently, the one he has been waiting to cut open and taste, to find out whether it worked. Matej won’t say he’s excited. He doesn’t have to.
“You won’t be here when I cut it,” Matej says. Flat. Matter-of-fact. The practical fact of it. “I’ll wait until you’re back.”
“You’ve waited nine months,” Luca says.
“I know. I —” He stops. “It’ll keep.” Matej looks at his coffee. His hands are still around the cup — both of them, tight. Not distress. More careful than that. Concentrated. The same thing, Luca thinks, that he himself has been sitting on since yesterday.
He wonders if Matej is also thinking: when he comes back.
Luca reaches across the table. Puts his hand over Matej’s.
Matej looks at it. Then looks at him.
“A week,” Luca says.
“Yes.”
“I’m coming back.”
“I know that too.”
He does know. That’s the thing — this is not a scene about doubt, about whether the ground will hold.
The ground holds. That’s been established in harder conditions than a week in Milan.
This is something else: the simple fact of the space between now and whenever, which is not very long but which is longer than any night since Luca came back through the gate and stood in the yard with his hands in his pockets.
Matej turns his hand over under Luca’s. Not pulling away — just turning it, so their palms are together.
“The Stoka Cabernet Sauvignon,” he says. “There are two bottles I haven’t opened.”
“For?”
“When you get back.”
Luca looks at him. “That’s very —” He stops. “You’re terrible at this,” he says. He means the words. Matej says everything else in kept bottles and uncut wheels, and that is a language Luca has no trouble reading.
“Yes.”
“Two bottles.”
“We found a distillery. It seemed appropriate to also have wine.”
Luca laughs — short, real, the kind that catches him off guard. Matej watches him laugh with the expression that means he is not laughing but is also not not-laughing.
He picks up the bag. Matej walks him to the car. That’s what happens now. The yard is Matej’s, and Matej is in it, and so is Luca, until he isn’t.
At the car, Matej’s hand finds the back of his neck — the gesture that is never performed, never announced, that always means exactly what it means. Luca leans into it for exactly as long as it takes to establish that he is doing so deliberately.
Say it, he thinks. Just say it.
He doesn’t say it.
“A week,” Luca says.
“A week,” Matej confirms.
Luca gets in the car. The gate at the end of the track. The road, the Karst opening out around him, grey and precise and cold.
He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t need to.
He knows exactly what’s behind him. He knows exactly what he didn’t say.
When I’m back.
Matej
The car reaches the road. Then it’s gone.
He closes the gate. Walks back across the yard — the same stones, the same grey sky. He has stood in this yard empty hundreds of times: early mornings before the animals, late evenings when the season turned and the work was done. He knows exactly what it weighs.
This is heavier.
He goes inside. The kettle is still warm.