Chapter 19
VIOLET
Matt is halfway through a reenactment that involves both hands, three vocal registers, and what appears to be a full-body commitment to the bit.
"She walks in," he says, pitching his voice low, setting the scene with the gravity of a man narrating a nature documentary.
"Six-fifteen in the morning. Nobody asked her to be there.
Nobody told her to go to the kitchen. She just..
." He breaks character to look at me, eyes wide, hands suspended mid-gesture. "Violet. She just walked in."
I'm on the stone bench in the garden, legs tucked under me, the late morning sun warm on my back. The air smells like orange blossom and warm stone and the kind of freedom that comes with sitting outside without permission or a schedule.
"And then?" I ask, because the man has clearly been building to this for fifteen minutes and I will not rob him of his crescendo.
"And then." He holds up one finger. The pause is theatrical. Twelve years of teenagers have made him very good at the pause. "She looks at the woman preparing food. She makes eye contact. Direct eye contact. And she says..."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Matt, I swear to God..."
"May I have some tea, please. Thank you." His voice goes high on please, cracks on thank you, and the grin that splits his face is so enormous and so unguarded that it rearranges his whole face into something beautiful.
"Unprompted," he says, like the word itself is a miracle. Like he's holding it in both hands. "Nobody coached her. Nobody stood behind her and whispered it. She just... she had it. She had it."
"You're telling me you're this excited about tea?" I laugh.
"I'm telling you I'm this excited about a please.
" He sits down on the grass in front of the bench, cross-legged, still beaming.
"Do you know how long that word takes? Not the pronunciation, the.
.. the choosing to say it. Two weeks ago she wouldn't look at anyone.
Wouldn't eat unless food was left in the room and the door was closed.
And yesterday she stood in a kitchen and asked for something she wanted and said please while she did it. "
The warmth in his voice has nothing to do with pride, not really, not the way people usually mean it. It's closer to awe. The awe of a man who has spent his adult life watching understanding arrive in someone's face and never gotten tired of the moment he sees it.
This is who he is. This is the actual person.
I have not been wrong about him.
"You're a good teacher, Matt."
He waves a hand like he's batting the words away. "She did the work. All of them do the work. I just sit there and butcher Italian badly enough that they feel better about their English."
"Noble strategy."
"Worked on my sophomores for twelve years. Signora Capelli, per favore, dove il bagno... and yes, I know I just said that with the accent of a man who learned Italian from a pizza box. That's the point."
Something loosens behind my sternum, as we chat, a knot I didn't know was there, or maybe I did and just stopped counting it among the inventory of things that hurt.
"What are you going to do?" I ask. "After. When all of this is whatever all of this eventually becomes."
He doesn't volley the question back at me the way most people would. The conversational reflex of deflection dressed up as politeness. He just considers it. Tips his head back. Looks at the sky through the tree branches like the answer might be written in the gaps between the leaves.
"I'll move into a smaller apartment," he says finally.
“My current one has three bedrooms. Don't ask me why.
I think I convinced myself I needed a guest room and an office, like I was going to become the kind of person who has guests and does work in a separate office.
Three years of heating a space I used maybe forty percent of.
" A small shake of his head. "Turns out I hate it.
Turns out all that empty space just reminds you that it's empty. "
He picks a blade of grass and turns it between his fingers.
"So. Small apartment. One bedroom. Big windows, though. That's non-negotiable. And a dog."
"What kind of dog?"
"Big. The kind that leans its whole body weight against your legs while you're standing at the kitchen counter, so you're always a little off-balance but you always know it's there.
" He demonstrates the lean, tilting sideways into invisible furniture, and the image is so specific and so ridiculous and so exactly Matt that my chest aches.
"And a garden," he continues. "I've never had one. In Connecticut I had a fire escape and a planter box with Gerald in it."
"Why did you call your basil plant Gerald?"
He looks at me like I've asked why the sky is blue. Like the answer is so self-evident that the question borders on offensive.
"He looked like a Gerald."
Then he asks about my future and the answer should be ready, should be right there on a shelf I can reach, and it isn't. Which surprises me.
I have always known what I was going to do next.
Architecture. Restoration. The patient, painstaking work of returning broken things to what they were before time and neglect and gravity conspired against them.
I was in the middle of restoring a cathedral when all of this started. But Santa Maria della Luce feels like a lifetime ago. Like someone else's life.
"I'll sketch again," I say, because this part I do know. "Design things. Restore things. I'm too good to stop and the world is full of things that need fixing," I say with more conviction than I feel. But the conviction has to start somewhere, even if it starts as a bluff.
He doesn't push. Doesn't ask about the cathedral, or my family in Boston. Doesn't poke at the space between I'll sketch again and the woman who stood on scaffolding with plaster dust in her hair and knew exactly who she was.
Instead he reaches into his pocket. Pulls out a folded napkin.
Hands it to me. On it, in what I can only describe as a genuine artistic emergency.
A daisy. Rendered in what appears to be ballpoint pen by a hand that has clearly never once in its life attempted to draw a flower.
Too many petals. I count nine, then eleven, then nine again, depending on which marks are intentional and which are just the pen slipping.
A stem at an optimistic forty-five-degree angle.
The center a lumpy oval that bears no relationship to any daisy that has ever existed in nature or in art or in the loosest possible interpretation of either.
"From the world's worst artist," he says, "to the world's best."
I look at the daisy for a long time.
I fold it back up. Put it in my pocket.
"It'll be your life again, Vi," he says. His voice is quiet now. Warm but quiet. "The scaffolding and the columns and all of it. It'll come back."
"You all right?" I ask him that evening, when I find him pacing the kitchen. The question comes out casual enough.
Too long. He takes too long to answer.
"Yeah." He smiles after a while, but it doesn't reach the right muscles. "Yeah, I'm good."
He isn't.
I wait. The way he waits when I need time to say something. I give him the silence and the space and the same patience he's given me a hundred times in cells and corridors and this garden.
He looks out through the glass doors. The garden is dark now, the bench just a shape, the lemon trees black against a sky that still holds some blue at the edges. Then he looks at me.
"I think I'll go home tomorrow," he says. "I have this feeling. Like a pressure. Like something is coming, you know?"
"Good or bad?"
He doesn't answer. Just looks at me with an expression I can't read. And I can always read Matt, always, that open face that holds nothing back, and the fact that it's holding something back now is a cold finger pressing against the base of my spine.
"Goodnight, Violet."
He pushes off the doorframe. Walks down the corridor toward the guest wing. His footsteps are even and measured, not the easy shuffle I know, and I sit with the unanswered question and the daisy in my pocket long after he's gone.
I can't sleep that night, Matt's words are playing in my head on repeat. I don't want him to leave. I'd talk to Elio about it again, but he never came to bed. Restless and unable to pretend any longer, I get out of bed and head into the garden.
It's dawning, the grass is wet with morning dew and the grounds are empty. My feet take me to the stone bench Matt and I usually occupy, and I sit down, not noticing the cold, trying to come up with words that'll convince him to stay. That'll convince him he's safe here.
The napkin daisy is in my hands. The stem really is terrible. Crooked. Committed, but crooked. Every time I count the petals I get a different number. Nine. Eleven. Ten. Like the flower itself can't decide what it is.
I fold it back up. Put it in my pocket.
I sit on the cold bench and watch the light move across the garden wall. Gold creeping over stone, inch by inch. A lizard appears on the far wall, small and gray-green, moving in that stop-start way they do. Dash. Freeze. Dash. Freeze. Tracking something invisible.
My brain does what my brain does. Follows the lizard. Measures the light. Counts the seconds between the dashes.
The lizard disappears into a crack in the mortar, but my eyes keep moving anyway, dragged by momentum, until they land on the window at the end of the garden path.
The glass is old, slightly warped in the way of estate glass that's been here longer than anyone alive, and it distorts whatever's behind it just enough that you have to focus.I focus.
I focus.
Elio is in the courtyard.
Valente is behind Matt.
Matt is on his knees.
I know it’s him from the set of his shoulders, the slight forward curve I sat next to on concrete for three weeks, the shape I leaned against in this same garden for three more. His back is to me.
His back is to me and he is on his knees.
Valente has one hand fisted in Matt’s hair, holding his head up. The other is on his shoulder, steadying him like a butcher steadying a calf.
Elio stands in front of them. Facing the garden. Facing the window. Not looking at me. His eyes are on Matt.
His face—
God, his face.
It isn’t cold. It isn’t controlled. It isn’t the man who held me in the maze and whispered “tesoro” against my skin. Whatever this is has ripped through every layer he owns and left something raw and open and already decided.
Rage.
Not the polished kind I know. This is older. Uglier. The kind that doesn’t ask questions anymore.
My hand finds my pocket, fingers closing around the folded napkin daisy just as Elio draws his blade across Matt’s throat.
The motion is quick and deliberate and there is no hesitation in it. None. Not a fraction of a second. Not the pause of a man who is reconsidering. The arm moves and the blade moves and Matt's shoulders...
Matt’s shoulders jerk once. Forward, then down. His hands come up, weak, useless, fingers twitching like they’re trying to hold something that’s already gone.
Valente keeps holding him upright by the hair, even as Matt’s body sags forward, the fight draining out of him in seconds.
I don’t make a sound. There is no sound left in the world.
My mouth is open but nothing comes out. The garden is quiet. The light is still moving across the stone wall. The lizard is gone. Elio’s face is still there, that same open, terrible rage, and Valente is still holding Matt upright by the hair so the blood can run freely down his front.
The gold light keeps creeping across the wall like nothing happened.
None of it stops.
None of it fucking stops.
I can’t breathe. My lungs are locked. My knees are locked. The only thing moving is my heart, slamming so hard against my ribs it feels like it’s trying to break out and run away from what it just saw.
Elio.
The man who carried me out of that compound.
The man whose hands shook when he held me.
The man who just opened Matt’s throat like it was nothing.
My fingers are white around the crumpled napkin daisy.