Chapter 7
CECILIA
Ilay still for a few minutes and let myself feel it.
The sheets were good quality, the kind with a thread count high enough that they felt cool and smooth regardless of temperature, and the room Lucia had put me in was at the corner of the guest wing with windows on two sides.
Through the gap in the curtains I could see that the sky was the particular dark blue that came just before the light changed, the last hour of night before morning committed to itself.
I thought about Nicola. I had cried everything I had the night before, sitting at that kitchen table with Lucia's hand covering mine while my mother, because that was what she had become in the space of an evening, talked to me about grief and anger and what you did with both when there was nobody left to direct them at.
I had cried until I was hollowed out and then Lucia had walked me to this room and turned down the bed and said goodnight in a voice so gentle it had almost started me crying again.
Now I was empty in the way you were empty after that kind of grief. Raw and scraped clean and very, very awake.
I got up, dressed quietly in the clothes I'd had in my bag, and opened my door onto the hallway.
The house was dark except for the low lights that had been left burning along the baseboards, enough to navigate by without disturbing anyone.
I stood in the hallway for a moment and then, because waiting in a room for someone to come and tell me what to do next was not something I was willing to do, I went to find the kitchen.
I found three other rooms first. What appeared to be a formal sitting room, untouched and perfect in the way of rooms that existed for occasions rather than living.
A smaller room lined with framed photographs that I paused in, letting my eyes adjust to the dim light, taking in the faces looking back at me.
Generations of Venosas, formal portraits alongside candid ones, the particular visual history of a family that had been somewhere long enough to accumulate one.
I found a photograph of Constantine that I thought was recent, standing with an older man in a garden, both of them in shirtsleeves, the older man laughing at something.
He was smiling in it, a real unguarded smile that was different enough from the expression he'd worn in the coffee shop that it took me a moment to be certain it was him.
I moved on before I spent too long looking at it.
The kitchen was at the back of the house, large and warm even without anyone in it, the kind of kitchen that had been used seriously and consistently for a long time.
Good copper pots hanging from a rack above the island, a well-seasoned cast iron pan on the back burner, herbs growing in small pots along the windowsill above the sink.
I found the coffee without much trouble, and the stovetop espresso maker, and I set about making myself useful in the only way available to me at five thirty in the morning.
The ritual of it was steadying. Measuring, tamping, the particular smell of good coffee beginning to bloom in the heat.
I had learned to make espresso properly from Jacob, who had learned from his grandmother, who had brought the knowledge with her from a village outside Naples the way you brought irreplaceable things when you left a place for good.
It occurred to me that Jacob would have heard by now that I wasn't coming back.
I hoped he wasn't worried. I hoped Constantine's man had said enough to reassure him without saying too much.
I hoped a lot of things, standing in that kitchen in the last dark hour before dawn, watching the espresso come through.
"You found the good coffee."
I turned. Constantine was in the doorway in dark trousers and a shirt that wasn't quite fully buttoned, his hair not yet in the order it was usually kept, looking like a man who had been awake for some time and had given up on sleep rather than just risen with the day.
He looked younger like this. Less assembled.
"I hope that's all right," I said. "I couldn't sleep and I didn't want to wait in the room."
"The kitchen is open to anyone at any hour.
My mother's rule." He came in without ceremony and reached past me for a second cup, close enough that I could smell the particular scent of him, something clean and faintly cedar-edged, and then he stepped back to a comfortable distance and leaned against the counter across from me. "How are you sleeping?"
"Better than I expected." I poured for both of us without being asked, because it seemed rude not to. "The house is very quiet."
"It wasn't always. When I was young there were always people here.
My father ran things from the house more than he does now and there was always someone in the kitchen or the sitting room at any hour.
" He accepted the cup and looked down at it.
"It got quieter when he got sick. People didn't know how to be loud in a house where someone was dying, so they just stopped coming as much. "
He said it without self-pity, just as an observation, and I thought it was probably the most personally revealing thing he'd said to me since we met. "That must have been lonely," I said.
He looked up from his cup. "It was." He said it simply, like a man who didn't feel the need to qualify honest answers.
"My father is a man who runs on people. On conversation and debate and the particular energy of a room full of people who respect each other.
Watching the house empty out around him has been its own kind of thing to witness. "
I wrapped my hands around my cup and thought about Dante Venosa, whom I hadn't yet met, whom I was going to meet today according to Constantine.
A man wasting away in a quiet house that used to be loud.
"Constantine told me I'd meet him today," I said, and then realized I'd referred to him in the third person while talking to him and felt my face warm slightly.
He noticed but didn't make anything of it. The corner of his mouth moved. "He's expecting you. He asked for you specifically, which means he was awake long enough last night to give me instructions, which is a good sign." He turned his cup in his hands. "He'll like you."
"You don't know that."
"I know him." He looked at me steadily. "And I've watched him assess people for thirty years. You'll be fine."
I wanted to ask him what he'd told his father about me.
What version of last night's conversation he'd carried up those stairs.
Whether he'd told him about the floor, about the newspaper clippings pressed against my chest, about the way I'd come apart in his office without planning to.
I decided not to ask. Some things were better left in the rooms where they happened.
"Can I ask you something?" I said instead.
"You can ask."
"Why did you come to the coffee shop yourself? You could have sent Lorenzo to bring me in. You didn't need to be there." I watched his face. "Why were you there?"
He was quiet for a moment, looking at his coffee.
Outside the kitchen windows the sky had begun its slow shift from dark blue to gray, the first reluctant suggestion of morning.
"Because I'd seen your photographs," he said finally, "and I wanted to see for myself whether the person in them was who I thought she was. "
"And?"
He looked up. "You said 'fucking Venosas' in front of my man and then apologized for it in the same breath because you were raised to have manners even when you were terrified." He almost smiled. "I thought that was probably a person worth meeting properly."
I looked at him across the kitchen in the growing morning light and thought about how strange and specific life was, that this was the conversation I was having, in this house, with this man whose family name I'd been raised to treat like a curse word.
"I'm sorry about that," I said, for the second time.
"I'm not," he said, and finished his coffee and set the cup in the sink.
"My father takes breakfast at eight if you'd like to join us.
Lucia will be up by seven." He moved toward the door and then paused.
"The library is at the end of the east hallway if you want something to do with the next hour.
Third shelf from the top on the left wall is in Italian if that's easier. "
He left before I could answer, and I stood in the kitchen with my coffee going cool in my hands and the morning coming slowly through the windows, and I thought that Constantine Venosa was considerably more dangerous than his reputation suggested, and not for any of the reasons I'd expected.