EPILOGUE
"In the end, it wasn't revenge that saved me. It was what came after it—the life I didn't know was waiting on the other side of the hatred."
Valentina MORETTI
Aurora was born on a February dawn, in Naples, with Luca holding my hand and the nonna praying outside the delivery room.
We gave her a new name. With no ghost.
Luca had been firm about it, back then—no Lucia, no Marta, a child doesn't carry the dead. So we chose Aurora.
Dawn. Because that's more or less what she was.
Now she was five months old, it was summer, and we were in Capri.
The pink house on the Via Tragara was open, windows wide, a clothesline in the yard, baby toys scattered through the living room that had once been the room where my brother was held prisoner.
Life has those turns. The same house where Donna Carmela locked up Matteo now had a baby hammock strung between two beams and smelled of warm milk and sunscreen.
"Are you going to tell me that's a fake cigarette?" I said, stopping in the terrace doorway.
Francesca almost dropped the cigarette on the parapet.
"Madonna, bella, you move like a cat." She put it out on the sole of her sandal, guilty. "It was the last one. I swear."
"You've been swearing that since you were fourteen."
"And you've been believing it since you were fourteen." She hugged me, hard, in her way. "Where's my goddaughter?"
"Sleeping. With the nonna."
Francesca had come from Palermo the week before. Godmother—as I'd promised that dawn, two winters ago, when I called her from the room in Posillipo to tell her my father was dead and that I was pregnant.
Now there she was, in the flesh, on the terrace of the pink house, with the salt of Capri in her hair and the forbidden cigarette in her hand.
"Look at that," she said, tipping her chin toward the garden below.
I looked.
The nonna was in the garden, in the wicker chair, with Aurora in her lap. Eighty-four now, slower, more bent, but still in black, still with the eyes that cut. She held the baby with that care of old hands, and she was singing.
Softly.
The Sicilian song. The same one as my mother's.
The nonna was singing to Aurora the song that Lucia sang under the Chopin, the same one that had come out of my mouth without my knowing, that day in the music room when I finally finished the music.
Passing it on. Again. From great-grandmother to great-granddaughter. By mouth, with no one teaching it.
I felt my eyes well up.
"Stop crying, bella," Francesca said, her voice breaking too. "If you cry I cry, and I've got mascara on."
I laughed and wiped my face.
Matteo appeared on the garden path, coming back from the Marina with a bag of fresh fish, barefoot, his skin burned from the sun.
A doting uncle. Rebuilt. He stopped near the nonna, crouched down, made a face at Aurora, who didn't understand a thing but waved her little arms. He laughed—the gap-toothed smile, the same as when we were children in Mondello, the same as in the photo on the wall of Luca's dead mother's room, the smile I thought I'd never see again.
He'd come back from the dead. And now there he was, barefoot in Capri, making faces at my daughter.
I looked at the whole scene from the terrace.
The house full. People, life, summer, fish in the bag, a baby in her great-grandmother's lap, my best friend beside me with a hidden cigarette, my brother alive in the garden. The exact opposite of the silent fortress of Posillipo during the war.
The opposite of the silence of the convent. The opposite of everything I'd known before.
And I thought of them.
Of Lucia. Of Marta. The two mothers who used to sit on a bench just like that one, in this same garden, some summer in the nineties, watching their children—me, Matteo, Luca, Raffaele—run through the vineyard.
The two mothers drinking limoncello, talking, not knowing what would come, not knowing the war, not knowing the hatred.
Now they were both dead.
And now it was me sitting in the garden, my daughter in her grandmother's lap, my generation on the terrace.
The cycle had repeated. But this time, without the man who ruined everything.
This time, in peace.