CHAPTER 25
"A dead mother's letter weighs more than a thousand letters from living men."
VALENTINA ROSSI
I got to Posillipo at seven forty-five in the evening.
The sky was purple. The lights of the house were already on. Tonio went through the gate without slowing, crossed the drive, and stopped at the main staircase. The double doors opened before I got out of the car.
Luca was already on the steps.
He didn't come down, just waited.
I climbed the stairs slowly—the cloth bag in one hand, my coat over the other arm, my hair undone from the trip, no makeup at all. I stopped one step below him.
"You came back."
"I came back."
He looked at me, and then he held out his hand.
Not for the bag. For my hand.
I put mine in his, and we went into the house together without another word.
We went up to his study.
He shut the door, sat down in the big leather armchair in the corner, and pulled me down to sit with him—in his lap, sideways, my legs draped over his right leg and my head against his good shoulder.
He kissed the top of my head.
"Bella mia. Tell me."
"I'd rather show you."
I took the envelope out of the inside pocket of my coat. The white envelope. My mother's seal. Per Salvatore. Solo per lui. Aprile 2012.
I put it in his hand.
"It's from my mother."
"You really want me to read it?"
"I do."
He nodded once and opened the envelope, taking out the three pages.
I stayed in his lap, didn't move. I put my hand in his free one, laced our fingers together, and watched the right side of his jaw while he read.
He read slowly.
He didn't say anything. His breathing didn't change. But I saw his jaw lock three times at three different points—once when he read his father's name, Don Marco. Again when he read his son, Luca, whom you've loved like a son since he was a boy in Capri. The third time when he read they die.
Both of them. In different ways. But both.
When he finished, he folded the three pages with the same precision she'd used to fold them and put them back in the envelope.
And he was quiet for about thirty seconds.
"Bella. Your mother knew."
"She knew."
"And he didn't stop."
"No."
He squeezed my hand. Tighter. Not hard—with presence, the way someone holds on alongside you.
"Valentina. Your mother was a saint."
"I know."
"And your father—" he began, simply, without weight, with the clean coldness of a man who'd decided something somewhere around the third paragraph. "Your father is a dead man."
I didn't say anything. I didn't cry. I didn't argue.
I stayed in his lap with my fingers laced through his, feeling his heart beat slowly against my shoulder, and I agreed in silence.
The Valentina from the convent, three months ago, would have backed down, asked forgiveness, begged for mercy for her father.
The Valentina of that night—the Valentina who had read her mother's letter three times on the drive back, who had seen it in writing that her father had been warned and had chosen to go on, who knew now that her own mother had foreseen her brother's death and her daughter's destruction—the Valentina of that night did not back down.
I turned my face and rested my forehead against his neck.
"I'm going with you to Palermo, Luca."
"I know."
"You knew?"
"I knew the moment you handed me the letter."
He kissed my forehead.
"But not now," he said calmly. "We get married first."
"Why?"
"Because after the wedding, bella, you're a Moretti on paper. And a Moretti doesn't go to Palermo as a daughter, she goes as a signora. And that difference is everything."
"When?"
"Five weeks."
"Five weeks is a long time."
"It isn't." He kissed my forehead again. "Wait with me, bella mia. Five weeks. I promise you everything will happen the way it needs to."
I looked at him.
"Lo prometto?"
"Lo prometto."
"Mors potius macula?"
He laughed, without humor. But he laughed.
"Mors potius macula."
And he kissed me.
Not with hunger this time, but with a promise…