Chapter Three
I do not go home that night. I go back to the building.
This is a bad habit and I know it is a bad habit, and Sophia is at Giulia’s downstairs eating something with too much sugar in it and being adored, and I stand in the empty ballroom of the Cassaro Palazzo at nine in the evening with a work light on the floor and my coat still on.
The scaffolding throws a grid of shadows up the wall. The sky on the ceiling is half cleaned. You can see the line where I stopped, a hard diagonal, dirty on one side and blue as a bruise on the other, and it looks like weather coming in.
I stand there for forty minutes.
I am not thinking about him. I want that understood.
I am thinking about the cement patch and the water table under the south range and whether the loggia columns were quarried at Candoglia or somewhere cheaper, and underneath all of that, in a room in the back of my head that I keep locked and do not go into, a man is standing at the front of a ballroom with his mouth closed.
Ines finds me at ten. She has my coat’s twin and worse patience.
“You are standing in the dark,” she says.
“There is a light.”
“You are standing in the dark,” she says again, and she takes my arm.
She takes me to the bar on Via Tortona where the tables are too small and the wine is too expensive, and she does it deliberately, because she knows I will not make a scene in a place with linen napkins.
She has brought a folder. Of course she has.
“Sit.”
“I am sitting.”
“You are perched. You perch when you are about to do something stupid.” She opens the folder and turns it around so it faces me, and I do not look at it. “Nora.”
“I am looking.”
“You are not.”
I look.
It is a printout. Kastellanos Maritime, share price, five years, and it is the shape of a man falling off a cliff in slow motion. Underneath it, in her handwriting, which is neat and vicious: 90 DAYS.
“They are being taken over,” she says. “Hostile. A Rotterdam group has been buying them in pieces for a year. They are not restoring a palace in Milan because they love Lombard plasterwork. They are doing it because there is a covenant in their refinancing. Heritage asset. Certified. Signed off by a licensed conservator.” She takes a drink. “There is one licensed conservator.”
“I know how many there are.”
“So say it out loud.”
“There is one.”
“Say the rest of it.”
I do not want to. She waits, because waiting is her whole method, and the bar hums around us and somebody laughs at something at the bar and I sit there with a glass I am not drinking from.
“They are ninety days from being eaten,” I say, “and I am the only person on earth who can hand them the paper that stops it.”
“Yes.”
“And he knows that.”
“He has known it for at least four months, if his lawyers are worth anything.” Ines closes the folder.
“Which is why the letter is signed by him personally and not by a procurement officer in Vauxhall. That letter is not a tender, Nora. That letter is a man knocking on your door with a very good excuse.”
I turn my glass around on the table.
Here is what I did not tell her. Here is what I have not told anybody.
When I read the name on that letter, before the cold came, before the room went still, there was a single half second where something in my chest went up like a bird off a wire.
Just up. Just glad. Four years of building myself back into a whole person out of rubble and glue and one small serious child, and my body still did that, it still did that, without asking me.
I have not seen his face in four years. I do not have a photograph. I threw them all away in an airport bathroom in Gardermoen with my hands shaking so hard I dropped two of them in the sink, and a woman at the next basin asked me if I needed a doctor.
And still. A bird off a wire.
That is the part I will never say out loud.
That is the part that decides it. Because a body that does that is a body that has not finished, and a woman who has not finished is a woman who can still be reached, and I did not spend four years learning to sleep through the night so that a piece of embossed paper could reach me.
If I run from the building, he owns the running.
“Walk away,” Ines says. “I will say it once and then I will never say it again, because I am your partner and not your mother. Walk away. Give it to Brambilla. He is competent, he is boring, he will not ruin the frescoes, and you will keep your license and your kid and your sleep.”
“Brambilla will grout the loggia.”
“Then let him grout the loggia.”
“He will grout the loggia,” I say, “with cement, Ines, because he does not read the water tables, he reads the invoice, and in eighty years that building will die from the inside out and there will be nobody left alive who knows why.”
“You do not care about the loggia.”
“I care about the loggia more than I have ever cared about anything except one person, and she is four, and she is asleep at my mother in law’s, except that I do not have a mother in law, do I, because the marriage never legally existed.
” I hear my own voice go flat and I stop. I put both hands on the table. “Sorry.”
Ines does not tell me it is fine. She never does. She sits there and lets it be exactly as bad as it is, and the waiter comes and looks at us and goes away again, correctly.
“That is the first time,” she says, “in two years, that you have said any part of it out loud in a public room.”
“Then it is out of my system.”
“It is not out of your system, Nora. It came out of you sideways, which is where it always comes out, and one day it is going to come out of you in front of a client.” She turns her glass. “Or in front of him.”
“You want revenge,” she says at last.
“No.”
“Nora.”
“No.” And this is the true thing, so I say it slowly, so she will believe it.
“If I wanted revenge I would have taken it four years ago, and it would have been easy, because I had a child in my body and a folder full of his mother’s signature and a very good lawyer’s phone number.
I could have burned that family to the ground before Sophia was born. ”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Because I was going to have a baby,” I say, “and I had one hundred and forty euros and a suitcase, and I sat on the floor of a rented room in Turin and I did the arithmetic, and the arithmetic said I could spend the next ten years destroying them or I could spend the next ten years building her a life. There was not enough of me for both.”
Ines does not move.
“And because burning things is not a life.” I take the wine now. I need it. “I do not want to hurt him. I have thought about this for four years and I am telling you the truth. I want a signature on a piece of paper and I want a life that belongs to me.”
“You are still married to him.”
“I am aware.”
“Nora, you have never signed.”
“He has never sent anything to sign.” I put the glass down harder than I mean to.
“That is the joke. That is the actual joke, Ines. There was a folder on a table in front of four hundred people that said the marriage was void, and nobody ever filed it. Nobody ever filed it. For four years I have been legally the wife of a man who let a room watch him take my name off a chair.”
Ines says nothing.
“So yes,” I say. “I would like a signature. That is my entire ambition. It is not a very cinematic one.”
“Then walk away from the building.”
“No.”
“Why?”
And there it is. The real one. She has walked me all the way to it, the way she does, and I hate her for a second and then I do not.
“Because he already took one thing,” I say.
The bar is loud. My voice is not.
“He took a night, and a name, and a room full of people who used to look me in the eye. He took the version of me that could stand in a doorway and be introduced to strangers without doing arithmetic about how much they know.” I put the glass down.
“I have chased that palazzo since I was twenty two. It was mine before I ever heard the word Kastellanos. It has nothing to do with him. It has never had anything to do with him.”
“And now it does.”
“And now it does, because he bought it, because that is what that family does, they buy the thing you love and then they stand in the doorway of it.” My hands are shaking.
I let them. “So no. He does not get a second one. He does not get to take a second thing from me, Ines. Not the building. Not while I am still standing up.”
Ines is very quiet.
Then she says, “He will be in the room.”
“Yes.”
“He will be in the room, and you will have to present, and he will look at you.”
“Yes.”
“And what will you do?”
“I will win the bid,” I say.
“And then?”
“And then I will restore his building.” I finish the wine.
“Beautifully. Perfectly. Every column, every capital, every centimeter of that ceiling, and I will hand him a certificate that saves four thousand jobs and a company he does not deserve, and I will take his money, and I will be the most professional human being in the history of the profession, and I will not give him one thing. Not one. Not a look. Not a first name.”
“That is not a plan, Nora. That is a hostage situation with a permit.”
“It is a contract.”
“It is eighteen months.”
“Then it is eighteen months,” I say.
She looks at me for a long moment, and something happens in her face that I do not like, something soft, and she reaches across the too small table and she puts one hand flat over my scarred thumb.
“He does not know about her,” she says. “Does he.”
The bar goes on making its noise.
“No,” I say. “And he is not going to.”