Chapter 4
LUCA MORETTI
She went up, and I stayed on the stone bench under the arbor for another fifteen minutes.
Not smoking, not stirring, looking at the stone floor between my feet, where the sunlight filtered through the vine made uneven stripes that stirred when the wind stirred.
Madonna.
The last woman to tell me no was my mother, when I was eleven and wanted to leave the house in the small hours with Matteo to see the volcano.
More than thirty years, more than thirty years without anyone saying the word no to me.
And that girl of twenty-three, raised in a convent, daughter of a man I'm going to kill before the year is out—that girl had told me no in the corner of my own arbor, with her hand on the strap of my own watch, and had lowered my hand from her face like someone putting out a flame.
And I couldn't get angry.
I put my hand to the corner of my mouth, the thumb that had almost touched her. I felt her warmth still there—maybe it was my imagination, maybe it was the light through the arbor, maybe it was the whiskey from the night before making my blood rise the wrong way.
I didn't take my hand away. I stayed another five minutes with my hand to my mouth, feeling something I hadn't felt in so many years that I no longer had a word for it.