CHAPTER 17
"There is no sea that can separate two who have decided to arrive together."
VALENTINA ROSSI
I woke at five.
I hadn't slept much. I'd dreamed of Matteo three times—once with him at eighteen on the nonna's terrace in Capri, smiling in the great-grandfather's photo. Another with him inside the pink house on Via Tragara, faceless, just the silhouette. The third I couldn't remember when I woke.
All that was left was a feeling of tightness in my collarbone.
I put on black linen trousers, a white silk blouse, and flats. A light jacket over my arm—June in Capri still turned cold at night. I left my hair down and carried the dagger in my boot.
Habit.
I also took Francesca's letter in the inside pocket of my jacket—I don't know why, but I took it.
I went down at five-forty.
Luca was already on the staircase. Black trousers, white shirt, black blazer over his shoulder, sunglasses hooked on his pocket. He hadn't slept either—I saw it in his eyes.
"Bella."
"Luca."
He looked at me from head to toe, taking his time.
"You didn't sleep."
"Neither did you."
He held out his hand without ceremony. I put mine in his, his fingers closed around mine—firm, warm, calloused—and we went down the staircase of Villa Moretti holding hands for the first time.
We went to the car. The driver—Tonio, I'd learned his name last week—closed the doors, took his place, and the car pulled away down the cypress drive without a sound, still dark outside.
His hand stayed in mine on the seat.
The Moretti yacht was anchored at Mergellina.
It wasn't small. It was a traditional Neapolitan gozzo, modified, about sixty-five feet, white, with wooden masts. A crew of four men, two of them I recognized from the house.
We boarded, and the captain greeted Luca with a nod. We went into the main cabin—a small room with leather benches, a low table, fresh coffee and cut fruit waiting.
Luca sat me down beside him on a leather bench and kept holding my hand.
The engine started. We left Mergellina at six-fifteen, the sun still hidden behind Vesuvius.
For half an hour he said nothing, and neither did I.
We stayed there, side by side, hands joined, looking out the rectangular cabin window while the yacht cut across the bay and the sky shifted from dark blue to pink-gray to gold.
I was the first to speak.
"How's it going to go when we get there?"
He let go of my hand. Slowly—not abruptly, just so he could turn to face me. He propped his elbow on the back of the bench and looked at me.
"I'm going to knock on the door," he said plainly. "The house doesn't have heavy security. Salvatore relies on the obscurity of the place, not on armed men. The woman who looks after Matteo is Donna Carmela, eighty-two, deaf in her right ear. I knew her when I was a child."
"All right."
"I go in, and you stay in the car."
"I'm not staying in the car."
"Bella..."
"I'm not going to stay in the car, Luca."
"I knew you'd say that."
"Then why did you try?"
"Because my job as your fiancé is to try."
I smiled openly, for the first time in three days.
He looked at me, smiling, and his eyes softened a little more.
"Bella. When I see Matteo, I don't know what I'll do."
"I know."
"I might hit him."
"You won't," I said slowly. "Because he's my brother. And you've loved him since you were seven. And because he was held prisoner by my father for seven years, Luca. Seven years. He's been beaten enough."
"You're younger than me, by sixteen years, bella. Why do you talk as if you were older than me?"
"Because of the convent."
"It was the best investment your father ever made without realizing it."
I didn't answer, just looked out the window.
Capri had begun to appear on the horizon. Gray at first, then purple, and very slowly gaining the green contours of the island against the blue.
I rested my head on his shoulder. Without ceremony.
He didn't move, but I felt him breathe in deep.
We stayed like that for fifteen minutes, until the yacht docked.
Capri hit me in the face like a strong perfume.
The marina smelled of orange blossom, salt, diesel, and fresh brioche—someone was opening a bakery near the dock at seven-thirty in the morning.
The seagulls made noise out of proportion to their size.
The first English tourists were already disembarking from another yacht, in straw hats and expensive clothes, oblivious.
Luca got off first, holding out his hand to help me down.
We crossed the marina without hurry. An electric cart was waiting for us—Capri had no normal car streets in the upper neighborhoods; it was all stone staircases or narrow lanes for electric carts. The driver greeted Luca by name. "Don Moretti."
I hadn't realized it, but the whole island belonged to him in some old way.
We climbed the road from the marina up to the center of Capri. Then we passed through the Piazzetta—empty at that hour, the cafés still closing up from the night before.
We went on and the lane narrowed, the walls of the villas beginning to appear on both sides—bougainvillea hanging, ivy, jasmine.
Via Tragara.
The driver stopped the cart and we got out.
Via Tragara was narrow, old, cobblestoned. On one side was the sea—you couldn't see it, but you could hear it. On the other, the villas, all with high fences.
We walked about three hundred yards, and there, at the end of the lane, in the corner on the right, with a thick ivy hedge climbing sixteen feet and a small wrought-iron gate painted white—a pink house.
Pale pink. A red-tile roof, windows with green shutters closed, bougainvillea climbing up the side to the upper terrace. There was a small fountain inside the garden—I could hear the water through the gate.
We stopped at the gate.
Luca put his hand on my waist, not to hold me back.
"Bella. If he's really here, in ten minutes your life changes again."
"I know."
"Are you ready?"
I looked at the ivy hedge and at the pink house behind the white gate.
I thought of Matteo at eleven, in my mother's kitchen in Mondello, teaching me to make arancini. I thought of the closed coffin in Palermo. I thought of the seven years of not knowing.
"I'm not ready," I said. "But I won't be any readier waiting out here."
Luca squeezed my waist.
"Brava."
He reached out and rang the bell at the gate.