"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.
CHAPTER 8
CECILIA
Constantine knocked twice before opening the door, which told me something about him and his father that I filed away without examining too closely. A man who knocked before entering his dying father's room was a man who understood that dignity mattered more than convenience, and that some courtesies became more important, not less, when everything else was being stripped away.
"Pop." His voice was different at the threshold of this room. Quieter, with something underneath it that he kept out of every other conversation I'd heard him have. "I brought someone to meet you."
Dante Venosa was propped against a bank of pillows in a large bed that suited him even now, when the illness had taken enough of him that the scale of it should have made him look diminished. It didn't. He had the kind of face that held its authority regardless of circumstance, dark eyes that were sharp and entirely present, and the particular quality of attention of a man who had learned over a long life that looking at something properly was rarely wasted effort. He looked at me the wayhis son looked at things, which was to say completely, without performance.
"So," he said. "You're the Avola girl."
"I'm Cecelia," I said. "The Avola part is something I'm working on leaving behind."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he smiled, and I understood immediately where Constantine had gotten the smile he kept almost using and then pulling back from. "Come in then, Cecelia. Sit down."
Constantine took the chair against the wall without being asked, settling into it with the ease of someone who had spent considerable time in this room, and I took the chair beside the bed and folded my hands in my lap and waited, because this was Dante's room and his time and I wasn't going to fill it with noise just to manage my own nerves.
Dante looked at me for a long moment without speaking, the unhurried assessment of a man who had no patience left for anything except the truth. "You're not what I expected," he said finally.
"What did you expect?"
"Someone more frightened." He shifted against his pillows. "You're frightened, I can see that. But it isn't the first thing." He tilted his head slightly. "What's the first thing?"
I thought about it honestly. "Angry," I said. "I think the first thing is angry."
He nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something he'd already suspected. "Good. Frightened women make poor decisions. Angry women make purposeful ones." He reached for the glass of water on his nightstand and I stood without thinking and handed it to him, and he accepted it without making anything of the gesture, which I appreciated. "Tell me about the vineyards. What do they look like in October?"
So I told him. I told him about the way the light changed in October, going golden and specific in the way of light that had passed through leaves before it reached you, and about the particular smell of the harvest, and the sound of the workers in the early morning moving through the rows. I told him about the stone walls that had been there longer than anyone could remember and the gap in the eastern wall that I had slipped through in the dark on the night I left. I told him more than I'd intended to, because he listened the way certain people listened, with his whole attention, and that kind of listening had a way of drawing things out of you.
I was aware of Constantine against the wall behind me, quiet and still, taking none of it and all of it in simultaneously. At some point in the telling I stopped being aware of him as a presence I needed to perform for and simply talked, the way you talked when you forgot to be careful, and I only registered that he had slipped out of the room when I heard the soft click of the door and turned to find the chair against the wall empty.
Dante watched me notice. "He does that," he said, without explanation, and somehow none was needed.
"My great-grandmother was from England," he said when I turned my attention back to him. "She used to describe the countryside there in exactly that way. The specific quality of the light. She said you could always tell where you were in the world by the color of the light in the afternoon." He looked toward the window. "I've always wanted to test that theory."
"It's true," I said. "Chicago light is completely different from Sicilian light. It's harder. More direct. There's nothing filtering it."
"That sounds about right for Chicago." He looked back at me with the hint of a smile. "Has my son been treating you well?"
The directness of it surprised a small laugh out of me. "Yes. He has."
