1
VIOLET
Three and a half weeks into my Sicilian adventure, and I’ve developed an intimate relationship with limestone dust.
It’s in my hair, my lungs, the creases of my knuckles… I’m pretty sure I’ve inhaled enough of this cathedral to qualify as part of the architecture. Which, honestly? There are worse fates than becoming one with a four-hundred-year-old baroque masterpiece that’s slowly crumbling into the Mediterranean.
Running my fingers along the cornice I’ve been documenting all morning, the plaster gives under my touch where it’s separated from the stone beneath. The whole east wall has this problem. A slow divorce between surface and structure unfolding for decades, maybe centuries. Nobody noticed until the gold leaf started flaking off in sheets, raining down on the pews like the world’s most expensive confetti.
That’s the thing about decay. It’s patient. It waits until you’re not looking.
My back pocket vibrates. Ignoring it, I pull my camera out to photograph the damage pattern before I lose the light. The afternoon sun streams through what’s left of the rose window, casting fractured rainbows across the altar. Half the glass is original, hand-blown in the 1600s by some Venetian masterwhose name is lost to history. The other half is a bad Victorian replacement that doesn’t quite match the color palette.
From across the nave, I know which panes are which. It’s a useless superpower, really. Like knowing every shade of gold leaf by manufacturer.
The phone buzzes in my pocket again.
“Yeah, yeah,” I mutter, wiping my hands on my jeans before fishing out my phone and seeing “Mom” on the screen. Third call today.
I let it ring two more times before answering, because I’m twenty-eight years old and still petty enough to make my mother wait.
“I’m alive.”
“Well, hello to you too.” Her Boston accent cuts through the Mediterranean static. “Would it kill you to lead with something besides reassuring me you haven’t been murdered?”
“Maybe I like keeping you on your toes.”
She makes that sound, half laugh, half disappointment, that all Murphy women perfect by age thirty. I’m ahead of schedule.
“You eating?”
“Yes, Ma.”
“Real food? Not just those tiny coffees and bread?”
“They’re called espressos, and the bread here would make you weep. It’s got this crust?—”
“Violet.”
I smile despite myself, tilting the phone against my shoulder as I pack up my camera. “I had pasta last night. Ate the whole plate. Ask Danny to look up the caloric content ofpasta alla Normaif it’ll make you feel better.”
“Your brother doesn’t need to be involved in your eating habits.”
“But he loves being involved in my eating habits. It’s his favorite hobby besides unsolicited opinions about my love life.”
A pigeon lands on the scaffolding above me, sending a small avalanche of dust onto my documentation binder. Great. Fantastic. I’ll be picking limestone out of my field notes for hours.
“Speaking of which?—”
“I’m hanging up now.”
“Violet Quinn Murphy?—”
“Love you. Call you Sunday. Say hi to the boys.”
I end the call before she can circle back to the topic of why I’m spending my late twenties alone in European churches instead of producing grandchildren like my brothers. It’s a conversation we’ve had so many times I could script both parts. She worries. I deflect. Nobody wins.
Santa Maria della Luce cathedral settles around me with a type of silence old buildings have, like the walls remember everything that happened inside them and haven’t decided whether to tell you. I used to think it was creepy when I first started this work. Now I don’t mind the company.
