CHAPTER 15
"A woman who gives up a man's secret loves out of self-interest—or hates out of experience."
VALENTINA ROSSI
I didn't sleep.
I lay on my back, eyes open in the dark, the jasmine on my wrist giving me back the arbor on every hour the clock struck.
Two. Three. Four.
His thumb at the corner of my mouth, the weight of his knee against mine, his hand falling back without a fight when I drew it away.
Thirty years without anyone telling me no, he'd probably thought. I'd thought it too. I thought a lot of things about Luca Moretti now—I felt things for him that seemed like his thoughts, thoughts that had entered me by osmosis, through the smell, through the air of the house.
I got up at six.
I took a cold shower and put on black pants, a white blouse, pinning my hair into a bun.
A uniform. Today was a workday—not a dress, not an arbor, not a thumb at the corner of my mouth.
Today was Bianca's day.
I went down at eight and found Luca in the hallway between the stairs and the breakfast room.
He'd just come down from his room—sleeves already rolled, white shirt, no jacket, hair still damp from the shower.
He hadn't expected me there, and I hadn't expected him either. We stopped in the middle of the hallway, a couple of yards apart, in the yellow light of the stairway candelabra.
"Bella."
"Luca."
He looked at me up and down. He took his time.
"I prefer the navy-blue dress."
I smiled, almost without meaning to.
"You'll have to wait until the next arbor."
"When?"
"When I ask the right question."
He laughed and walked toward me. He didn't come to where I was—he passed me in the hallway, his shoulder brushing lightly against mine, the way a big man's shoulder brushes a woman's when he passes on purpose down a hallway that had room enough not to.
His skin burned through the fabric.
"A presto, bella," he said, without turning around.
He kept walking, and I stood there in the hallway for ten seconds before I could remember where I was going.
Bianca, Valentina.
Bianca was already in the music room when I arrived.
Not on the white sofa this time, but on the piano bench, her back to the door.
I stopped in the doorway.
She played well. Not Chopin—Debussy, Clair de Lune. Small hands, with her rings, running over the keys with the precision of someone who learned young.
I hadn't known she played; I'd imagined she was the type who learned to fake playing to impress men at dinner.
I stayed in the doorway, didn't interrupt her.
"Sit down, Valentina."
I walked to the white sofa and sat down.
She wore no makeup today, no dark-gray dress. Her green eyes had shadows under them that the face powder had hidden the night of the engagement, and that she'd left showing today on purpose.
"I thought all night," she said, in a lower voice than yesterday, more tired. "I accept. But there's one condition."
"What is it?"
"I tell you everything I know about your father, Valentina. Everything. And in exchange, Luca doesn't read a word of the letters, and you let me leave Posillipo alive."
"What do you mean, leave alive?"
"Bella," she said plainly, without theatrics. "You think Luca is going to leave me breathing after he finds out what I did?"
"What exactly did you do, Bianca?"
She rested both hands on the piano bench behind her, looking at the floor.
"I altered the envelope."
"I know."
"But it wasn't my idea. It was your father's idea."
I saw Vesuvius through the window—still sleeping, across the water, indifferent as ever.
"Go on."
"Your father came to me in January. A week after I ended things with Luca.
" Her voice grew steadier as she talked, like someone getting used to the confession.
"He already knew it was over. I don't know how, but he knew, within forty-eight hours.
He invited me to lunch in Rome, at the Hotel Hassler. "
"What else?"
"I'd known for years he was part of the underworld, Valentina. I knew what he was." She looked at me, resolute. "When he called me to Rome in January, I knew it wasn't to get back together. I knew it was to use me."
"Use you how?"
"He offered me two hundred thousand euros to do three things."
"What were they?"
"First: keep circulating in Luca's life as a friend of the family, so I'd keep having access to the house.
Second: when you arrived, introduce myself to you.
Plant doubt about Luca in your head. You'd find things out slowly—one at a time—and through me, not through Luca.
Third: alter the envelope, change the date on that letter, so that if anything was suspected, confusion would set in and you'd have to choose who to distrust—Luca or your father.
And since you grew up hating Luca, he bet you'd choose to distrust him. "
I felt the blood rising up the back of my neck.
"My father..."
"Your father..."
"My father hired you to manipulate me inside Luca's house."
"Sì."
"Why?"
"Because he's afraid of you finding out, bella."
"Finding out what?"
She looked at me, more tired than I'd ever seen her.
"That Matteo is alive."
The room went dark and came back. I saw the light flicker for a second—was it the light, or was it me?—and steady again.
"What?!"
"Matteo is alive, Valentina," Bianca said slowly, plainly, without pleasure.
"I had lunch with him in Capri nine days ago.
Your father faked his death in 2019. He put him on a family estate somewhere in Switzerland for three years, and two months ago he took him out and brought him to Capri.
He's hidden in the house of an old mistress of your grandfather's, on a street called Via Tragara. A pink house with an ivy hedge."
I couldn't breathe.
"Why?"
"Because Matteo had found out, in 2015, that your father was stealing from the Morettis.
He was siphoning money from joint operations into overseas accounts in his name and the names of the Sicilian partners.
Matteo confronted him, and your father ordered his son killed.
" Bianca closed her eyes for half a second.
"But at the last minute he couldn't, he just changed the order and had him hidden. "
"Killing... would have been easier."
"Killing would have been easier for any father, not for Salvatore Rossi. Salvatore is proud, but he isn't a complete monster. As long as Matteo had vanished, he could control the story, and he could use the fake death to blame the Morettis and start the war he wanted to start anyway."
"Why did he want the war?"
"For control of the south, for the routes, for the Morettis' private bank, which he wanted to absorb. Bella, the same things the men of this famiglia have been killing over for three hundred years."
I stood still.
The room was still normal, the clocks were still ticking. Vesuvius was still there. Bianca was still on the piano bench, her confession hanging in the air between the two of us like a curtain.
But inside me, something was breaking slowly. I could feel the pieces rearranging.
Matteo, alive. In Capri. Nine days ago. Having lunch with her.
"Why did he tell you, Bianca? Why did Matteo meet you in Capri?"
"Because he found out your father promised you to Luca, bella.
And he doesn't want the wedding to happen.
Because as long as you're promised to Luca, Luca can't find out he's alive.
And as long as Luca can't find out, Matteo stays in a luxury cage on the island.
He wants out, wants to go back to Palermo, and for that he needs the wedding not to happen. "
"So what exactly did he come to you for?"
"To convince you to run, to convince you to go back to Palermo, and also to convince you to refuse Luca before September 8th."
"And you're telling me all this for what reason?"
Then she looked at me. And for the first time since I'd met Bianca Varga, I saw something that looked like truth in her eyes.
"Because your father offered me two hundred thousand euros in January," she answered plainly.
"But Luca gave me seven years of his life, bella.
And even when he ended it, even when he sent me away, even when he traded me for a girl of twenty-three fresh out of a convent who sets her jaw when someone doubts her—even so, I can't betray him completely.
" She looked at the floor, thoughtful. "I altered the envelope, I did what I promised your father, but I can't let you go back to Palermo without knowing. "
"Why not?"
"Because you're the only thing that's happened to Luca in seven years that's going to save him. And I, even now, even hurt, would rather have him saved than avenged."
I swallowed hard and stood up slowly. My legs were shaking.
"Bianca. You're telling me this because you know I'm going to tell Luca."
"I know."
"And you're asking him to let you live."
"I'm asking you to ask him to let me live. That's different."
I looked at her so long that she looked away.
"I'll ask."
"Grazie."
"But you leave Posillipo tomorrow. And you never come back."
"Capisco."
"And if I find out, at any moment in the next twenty years, that you're meeting with my father again—I'll go back to Palermo myself and finish what Luca didn't. Chiaro?"
"Chiaro, Signora Moretti."
The word hit me in the chest like a blow.
Signora Moretti.
For the first time, someone had called me that.
I didn't go to my room.
I crossed the west wing hallway, turned right down the corridor of the family bedrooms—where I'd never set foot, where the doors were all dark oak and the candelabra were bronze, not crystal—and stopped in front of the last door at the end of the hall.
Luca's room.
I'd never come here.
I knocked three times, and his voice came from the other side, low:
"Avanti."