CHAPTER 11
"A fish won't bite the bait it recognizes." —Sicilian fishing proverb
VALENTINA ROSSI
The car left Posillipo at six on Friday morning.
My father had arrived Thursday night. He hadn't had dinner with the family—he asked to be served in his room, claiming he was tired from the trip.
I went down to greet him in the salon for two minutes. I kissed his hand the way you kiss a bishop's hand, and he kissed my forehead.
Then he went back upstairs. That was how father and daughter had greeted each other in our house for fifteen years.
Luca hadn't come down for the goodbye. By choice.
Raffaele came down—he kissed my hand too, without his usual lopsided grin, with a seriousness that unsettled me more than his charm did. He whispered in my ear as he handed my luggage to the driver:
"Be careful in Palermo, cognatina. Your father's house is no longer your home."
"I know."
"No, you don't know yet."
My father didn't speak to me for an hour.
We sat on the same back seat, separated by two feet of German-car leather, and he read Il Sole 24 Ore from the front page to page four, in silence, as if I were furniture.
I looked out the window at the sun rising over Calabria. Cows, cypresses, gas stations going past.
Twenty-five miles before Salerno, he folded the newspaper.
"That was brave."
I looked at him.
"What?"
"The red," he said without looking at me. "The night of the engagement."
"It was necessary."
"I observed Bianca last night in the salon, before you came down. She'd been planning that scene for a week."
"I noticed."
"You answered well."
"Thank you."
"It's not a compliment. It's an observation."
I glanced at him sideways. My father at sixty-two was a man who had shrunk over the last few months without my noticing—the suit had gone half a size too big in the shoulders, the skin of his neck a little loose over the collar, his hands marked with spots I didn't remember seeing.
The small black eyes were still the same, but the whites had yellowed a little.
This man right here could have had my brother killed, I thought. This man right here could have ordered a Moretti soldier to pick up a gun and fire.
I couldn't hold on to the thought, and I looked back out the window.
"Papà. Why did you never tell me about Capri?"
"Because Matteo died, Valentina. Because the Morettis became our enemies after that. And because I didn't want you growing up thinking of your brother as someone who had an emotional bond with the family that killed him."
"You mean, with the family that seemed to have killed him."
He turned, and that was when he looked at me, very slowly.
"What did Luca tell you?"
"You know what he told me."
"I know what I think he told you."
"He said the bullet came from a Moretti gun, but the order came from somewhere else. That there's a traitor inside his house, one he's been hunting for three years."
"I see."
"Do you believe it?"
He took another drag, looking straight ahead.
"I believe that Luca believes it."
"That's not the same thing."
"It's not," he paused, "but it's enough for me not to pull you out of his house right now."
The sentence hung in the air between the two of us.
"Why not pull me out now?"
"Because you're my daughter. And because as long as you're there, I can know what he knows."
So that was it.
Luca had been right—I was the hook on both sides. The two of them had agreed, without agreeing, that as long as I was in the middle, each could spy on the other through my mouth.
I looked out the window again. The road climbed a slope, and a sign announced Salerno in twelve miles.
"Papà," I said softly, "who's the traitor in the Moretti house?"
He laughed.
"Bella mia. If I knew, the war would have ended in 2019."
"You know there is one."
"I suspect so. The way Luca does."
"Who do you suspect?"
He didn't answer for a whole mile of road. When he answered, it was without looking at me:
"Ask Adelina when she comes for the wedding. The Moretti nonna hasn't forgotten anything. She only pretends."
And he went back to the newspaper.
It was the first useful piece of information my father had given me in twenty-three years of my life.
Palermo welcomed me the way it welcomes all the children who come back: as if they'd never left.
The house in Mondello was just the same. Rosalia hugged me at the kitchen door for thirty seconds without saying anything—I felt her breathing in my hair again, counting how many pounds I'd lost by the ribs she could feel through my blouse.
When she pulled back, her eyes were red.
"Madonna, bambina. You're thin."
"I eat, Rosalia."
"You don't eat. I made arancini. Sit down."
I ate three fried rice balls while she told me what had happened in the house during the three weeks I'd been away: the cat that died, the neighbor who moved to Rome, the pantry pipe that burst on Tuesday.
I ate and listened. The house smelled of tomato and basil, and through the kitchen window I could see the sea at Mondello breaking against the stone of the promenade.
For thirty minutes, I wasn't Luca Moretti's bride.
It was a relief I didn't know I needed.
"Bella!"
Francesca saw me at the gate and came running.
I hadn't expected her to already be at the house when I arrived—the driver dropped me at the door and went to put the car away, and she appeared from the side garden, running in flip-flops, her hair pinned up any old way, a wrinkled cotton dress, the way only she ever showed up for me, ever since we were fourteen.
She hugged me so hard I lost my breath.
"Madonna santa. You're in one piece." She held me at arm's length and looked me up and down. "You're thin."
"Why does everyone keep saying that?"
"Because you're thin, woman." She took my face in her hands and looked into my eyes. "Tell me everything. Here, now, out of Rosalia's earshot, because she hears everything and tells your father."
"Everything?"
"Everything."
We walked through the garden to the stone bench under the lemon tree where we'd deciphered the Madre Superiora's old Italian at fifteen. The memories were all jumbled up inside me after three weeks.
I told her everything in two hours without skipping any details.
The photo. The vineyard. The ankle. The elbow. Bianca. The red. The office. The three versions. The letter with the altered date. The blue book. Nonna Adelina. The meeting through the wall. The hook. The "you know."
Francesca listened in silence and smoked three cigarettes over the course of the story. When I finished, she blew the smoke upward.
"Bella. You're in love."
"I'm not."
"You're in love."
"I'm not."
"Bella, you just told me you felt hunger after he said brava in your ear. Hunger. You've never used that word in your life."
"I hate him."
"You hate him and you hunger for him. The two can coexist, amore. That's what a complicated woman does."
I went quiet.
"Did you open my letter?"
"No."
"Bella..."
"I haven't opened it yet, but I will."
"Open it now."
I took the letter out of the inner pocket of my coat. I'd brought it with me from Posillipo—I hadn't been able to leave it there. Francesca's wax seal, red, with her initial, still intact.
I broke the seal and unfolded the paper.
Bella... If you're opening this letter, it's because your courage has run out. Remember one thing: you didn't go to Posillipo to get married. You went to find out who killed Matteo. Everything that happens outside of that is smoke. Don't mistake the fire for the smoke. I love you. —Fra.
I looked at her and saw her eyes were wet.
"I knew you'd open it today," she said. "I didn't know if it would be out of courage or out of confusion."
"Both."
"Now I know."
I got home at eleven at night.
My father had gone to a business dinner in Palermo. He wasn't expected back before one in the morning.
I went upstairs and crossed the hallway to my father's office door.
Closed, always closed, but I knew where the spare key was—I'd known since I was twelve, because I'd searched the whole house during the summers my father traveled.
The key was kept under the portrait of Saint Sebastian, on the doorframe, stuck there with a strip of tape yellowed from so much use.
I took the key, unlocked the door, and went in.
My father's office was smaller than Luca's.
Less elegant, more functional. A dark wood desk, three low bookcases, a steel safe behind a Caravaggio painting (not an original—a good copy, but a copy), and a leather armchair worn at the creases.
I went straight to the desk.
Top drawer. Locked—no way to open it without a key. Middle drawer. Open. Bank paperwork, old contracts, nothing new.
Bottom drawer. Open too.
Inside it, an old, stained brown leather folder. I took it out and opened it.
They were letters.
Handwritten letters, on stationery folded in three. The handwriting looked like a woman's. The first had been written in June 2016—seven months after my mother's death. The last, in January of this year.
Twenty-three letters in all.
All signed with the same initial:
B.
And on the last letter, in the bottom corner of the page, two kisses pressed in lipstick. Silver-gray.
Silver-gray.
The color of Bianca's dress, of the bracelet, of the nail polish, of the lipstick...
And just like that, it hit me that Bianca Varga had been my father's lover for seven years.
Before she was Luca's lover.
Or during it.
I heard the garage gate opening downstairs.
I closed the folder and put it back, and left the office. I locked the door and put the key back behind Saint Sebastian, and quickly crossed the hallway.
I reached my room before he came into the house.
I sat down on the bed in the dark. And I thought, with my heart pounding in my ears:
I'm going back to Posillipo on Sunday. And I'm going to look at Bianca Varga differently. Because now I know something not even Luca knows.