Strozzi! (The Strozzi #2)

Prologue I - The Crash

Florence, Italy · Four Years Before

The Call

The voice on the other end is Italian and careful, and the careful is the part that tells her before the words do.

“Signora Strozzi-Stroub. La chiamo per conto dell’Aviazione Civile Italiana. Mi dispiace molto.”

(“Signora Strozzi-Stroub. I am calling on behalf of the Italian civil aviation authority. I am very sorry…”)

She does not remember sitting down. She must have done it because her hands are free when she finds them again, gripping the edge of the kitchen counter.

The villa is bright behind her. Outside the window, Florence is doing what Florence does in the morning, which is going on without her.

The man is still talking. The Gulfstream G650ER. The Atlantic. The weather. The investigation. The bodies. Alex hears bodies and the kitchen tilts slightly and rights itself.

She has the next sentence already, which is the sentence she has been preparing in some part of herself for thirty years without knowing she was preparing it: I will need to make arrangements. She says it. The man says he is so very sorry. She says thank you and ends the call.

The phone goes down on the counter. She does not pick up the second one beside it, the one she would use to call her brother across the city or her sister in the hotel by the river. She does not call the housekeeper somewhere upstairs. She does not call anyone.

She does not move.

She is a woman who has spent a lifetime being the person who moves first, and at nine-fifty-three in the morning, in the kitchen of a villa her parents will never come back to, she finds the limit of that.

She has not moved when the church bells start at noon.

***

The night before, in Florence. Before the call, before the kitchen, before the church bells. When everything was still whole.

The Villa

Alex is looking for her mother.

The great room is full of noise, the way the Strozzi family has always filled rooms: completely, without leaving much space for the edges. The collection showed that afternoon to a private room of buyers, critics, and friends of the house.

It was Chiara’s collection, exactly what she had wanted it to be: uncompromising, beautiful, and in no way safe. By evening the whole house is lit, the courtyard lanterns and the long table and the sconces on the staircase all burning, and the family has gathered to say so.

Alex comes down the corridor toward the salon, passing the turning where the hallway opens into the great room. She rounds it at a walk and stops.

Her parents are just inside the archway, apart from the crowd by a foot and a half, which is exactly how they have always been: technically in the room, privately somewhere else entirely.

Marco’s hands are at Chiara’s jaw. Not cradling it, exactly. Holding it the way you hold something you are afraid of losing and are trying not to show.

Chiara has her face tilted up and she is looking at him with an expression Alex has almost never seen on her. Not the composure of a fashion house director. Not the warm efficiency of the mother who lists things and manages departures and cups her daughter’s face at the door.

Something underneath all of that. Something that Marco apparently has always known how to reach.

Alex does not move. She is not sure she could.

She has spent her life watching her mother manage every room she enters. The steel of her, the precision of it. She understood, in a general and theoretical way, that her parents loved each other.

She has never seen it from this angle: her mother’s hands going to Marco’s wrists and staying there, the look on Chiara’s face before she knows anyone is watching.

She looks, Alex thinks, like a woman who is being held by the only person who has never once asked her to hold herself together for him.

She takes a step back. Then she composes herself, and comes around the corner again, and this time her heels make enough noise on the tile that her father looks up and sees her.

“There she is,” Marco says, and opens the circle for her.

She is good at the edge, always the one who reads the room so that no one else has to, who refills the glass before it empties, who catches what would otherwise go uncaught. She watches her siblings laugh and feels, as she often does, both essential and slightly outside.

This is not self-pity. Just the geometry of her place in the family. And she has made a kind of peace with it. She lifts her glass when Marco calls for the toast. She does not look at the hallway that leads to Chiara’s studio.

A moment later Chiara finds Alex across the room. Just for a second. “Stop watching me,” her eyes say, the way a mother’s eyes have always said things to a daughter without the room needing to hear it. Alex looks away.

An hour later Chiara slips away from the salon. Alex sees it: the quiet set of her shoulders, the way she moves toward the corridor rather than the kitchen, the unhurried purpose that means the studio.

Alex starts after her. She gets three steps into the hallway and stops. Her mother often needs space after a collection shows, a room to herself and a pencil and the release of an evening finally over. Alex has always known this about her.

She turns back to the party. She will always turn back to that decision. That small choice, the three steps and the turning back, will haunt her for the rest of her life.

The Studio

Lorenzo Jr. finds his mother the way he always finds her in a room full of people: by looking for the one who has stopped performing. She is in the studio by the time he gets there, her shoes off, lamplight pulled low, the pencil already moving across paper.

He sits in the chair across from her without asking. He never asks.

This room is different from the rest of the house, quieter in its bones, organized according to its own logic, covered in the kind of evidence that a creative mind leaves behind when it isn't being watched.

Lorenzo Jr. is always comfortable here in a way he isn't in the main salon, where everyone has an opinion about what he should be doing with his talent and his face and the last name he carries.

He sketches. She sketches. For a few minutes the only sound is pencil on paper and the distant drift of voices from the party. It is enough. It has always been enough with Chiara.

Then she sets something on the table between them. A small leather journal, old and dark, its cover stamped with a crest he doesn't recognize immediately and then does: the Medici lily, worked into the leather with a craftsman's care.

She doesn't open it. She rests her hand on a note sitting on it for a moment, the way you touch something before you decide what it means, and then she looks at him with the directness she keeps for things that matter.

"It belonged to your grandfather," she says. "Lorenzo. It holds what this family was always meant to become." She pauses. The pencil is still in her hand. She lifts it up.

"Lorenzo is the key."

He doesn't answer right away. He looks at the journal and feels what he always feels when someone holds something out to him and expects him to become it.

He knows what the world does with a man who looks like him and carries a name like his: it decides who he is before he opens his mouth, and then it is very attached to being right. He has spent years making sure no one could fit him neatly into a frame.

He deflects as he always does, by drawing. His pencil moves. After a moment, Chiara's moves too, and for a little while the journal sits between them and no one speaks and the shapes on their pages say the things neither of them has the right words for tonight.

When she finally tucks the note inside her own sketch pad, it looks like an afterthought. She does it so naturally that he almost misses it. Almost. He watches her hand pick up the page and decides not to ask.

Marco appears at the studio door. “The car will be ready at four. The jet is fueled. Everything is arranged.”

Chiara rises with the smooth efficiency of a woman who has been managing departures her whole life.

She closes the journal, glances at Lorenzo Jr. with a look that carries more than it names and moves toward the door. The note stays behind in the sketch pad on her worktable. The lamp burns on.

The Farewell

The villa is quiet before the sun is up. Alex is already moving through it, always the one who is already moving, checking the cases by the door, confirming the car is here, making sure the housekeeper has the departure list and the driver has the flight details.

Her parents' departure is organized and efficient and full of the small acts of love that a family learns to exchange in the margins of ordinary life.

Marco is on the phone. He is always, in these final minutes, on the phone. Chiara is listing things to Alex: the housekeeper's schedule, the follow-up calls from yesterday's buyers, the fitting on Thursday.

Alex absorbs them in the practiced way she has, nodding, filing, making the mental notes that will hold the villa together in her parents' absence.

It is ordinary. She has done this a hundred times. She begins a sentence.

It starts as it has started a dozen times before, in her head, in the middle of the night, in the three seconds before she changed her mind.

"Mamma, there’s something I need to tell you." Chiara turns with that full, warm attention that always made telling the truth feel both easier and more costly.

Alex stops. This is not the moment. The car is here. Her father is ending the call.

Matteo is asleep upstairs and the timing is wrong and there will always be another moment. She finishes the sentence differently, and Chiara moves on to the next list item.

And the sentence disappears back into the space where Alex keeps the things she hasn’t said.

Chiara cups her face in both hands at the door. She has done this since Alex was small. This gesture she has always made, thumbs against her cheekbones, looking at her oldest child with so much certainty.

"You hold us all together," she says, and means it completely.

Alex hears it the way she has always heard it: as the most loving description of a life she didn't entirely choose. She puts her hands over her mother's and holds them there for one breath longer than she normally would.

Then the car pulls away. Alex watches until the lights are gone. The drive is empty. The morning birds are starting in the olive trees.

Matteo is still asleep. She goes back inside through the kitchen door, and the villa, still warm from last night's party, closes around her like a house that believes it will always be this full. She passes the studio. The light is still on. She does not go in.

Five hours from now the phone will ring, but she does not know that yet. She makes coffee, and the house is still hers, and the morning birds are still in the olive trees.