"He's not always easy," Dante said, with the frankness of a man who had earned the right to it. "He holds things very close. Always has, even as a boy. His sister was the one who wore everything on her face. Constantine was the one you had to watch to understand." He paused. "But what's in there is worth the patience. I want you to know that."
I looked at my hands. "He barely knows me."
"He brought you here," Dante said simply. "For Constantine, that's a considerable statement." He shifted again, and I could hear the effort in it, the way his breath caught slightly with the movement. "He told me about your friend. The young woman who helped you." His voice gentled. "I'm sorry. That kind of loss doesn't resolve quickly. Don't let anyone tell you it should."
My throat tightened. "She deserved better than what happened to her."
"Yes. She did." He said it without qualification or comfort that would have rung false, and I was grateful for that. "The best thing you can do for her is live well. Loudly and well, in a way that would have made her happy to have helped you." He looked at me steadily. "Can you do that?"
"I'm going to try."
"Good." He nodded once, as if the matter were settled. We sat in a comfortable quiet for a moment, the kind that didn't need filling, and I thought about how strange it was that I had been in this house for less than two days and was sitting in this room feeling more genuinely seen than I had in twenty-two years in my father's house.
The door opened softly and Lucia looked in, her eyes going first to her husband and then to me with a warmth that was becoming familiar. "I thought you might like some tea," she said, and it was clearly directed at both of us without favoring either.
"Come in, come in amore.” Dante waved her through. "We've been talking about light."
"Have you." She set the tray on the nightstand and poured without fuss, handing me a cup before her husband, which I noticed and which seemed to be the natural order of things in this room rather than a pointed gesture. "Cecelia, has he told you about the time he tried to take a photograph of the light in Venice and dropped his camera into the canal?"
"That story isn’t flattering to me," Dante said.
"No," Lucia agreed pleasantly. "It isn't." She looked at me with a smile that invited me into the joke, and I felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn't realized was still wound tight.
She stayed for one cup of tea, talking lightly about nothing consequential, and then excused herself with the graceful efficiency of a woman who understood when two people needed to be left alone again. The door closed behind her and Dante watched it for a moment with the expression Constantine wore when he thought no one was looking, the one that was quieter and more unguarded than his public face.
"Forty-one years," he said, not to me particularly. "And she still makes every room better by being in it." He looked back at me. "That's what you want, Cecelia. Not a transaction. Not a strategy. Someone who makes every room better." He was quiet for a moment. "I think you already know that. I think that's why you ran."
"Yes," I said. "That's exactly why I ran."
He nodded. Outside the window the winter afternoon was fading, the light going gray and flat in the way of Chicago light that I was already learning to read differently from the light I'd grown up with. "My son is going to want to talk to you soon," he said. "About something practical that is also, whether he admits it to himself yet or not, something more than practical." He looked at me directly. "I want you to listen to what he says and then make your own decision. Not the decision fear would make for you. Your own decision."
"What if they're the same decision?" I asked.
"Then you'll know it's the right one." He reached out and patted my hand once, briefly, with a hand that had once been large and was still precise. "Now. Tell me what you know about Sicilian wine, because I have opinions and I suspect you're going to disagree with most of them."
I laughed, a real one, and moved to sit on the end of the bed so Dante didn’t have to turn his head to look at me. We argued companionably about wine for another half hour while the light faded in the window and the house moved quietly around us, and I thought that Dante Venosa was the father I should have had, and that thinking so felt less like grief and more like something I intended to hold onto.
Constantine knocked twice before opening the door to tell us dinner was ready, and when he looked at his father and then at me and saw whatever was on both our faces, something in his own face settled into a quietness that looked very much like relief.
CHAPTER 9
CONSTANTINE
Ifound her in the library at the end of the east hallway, which was where she'd been spending her afternoons, curled into the chair by the window with a book open across her knees and her legs tucked underneath her in the way she sat when she thought no one was watching. She was in the dark green sweater my mother had produced from somewhere, slightly too large at the shoulders, and her hair was loose and there was a small frown of concentration on her face that disappeared when she looked up and saw me in the doorway.
"You don't have to knock," she said. "It's your library."
"I wasn't going to." I came in and took the chair across from her. "What are you reading?"
She tilted the cover toward me. The Italian novel I'd pointed her toward on the first morning, the one set in Sicily. "It felt like the closest thing to home on the shelf," she said, with the slight self-consciousness of someone caught in a feeling they'd expected to have privately. "Which is strange, because home wasn't particularly safe. I didn't expect to miss it."
"What do you miss?"
She considered it seriously, which I was learning was how she approached most things. "The bread," she said. "The light in October. The smell of the harvest in the early morning before it got hot." She looked down at the cover. "Things that were just the place. Nothing to do with my father."
"The place existed before him," I said. "It'll exist after."
She looked at me as if I'd said something that surprised her, not in its content but in its directness. "Your father said something like that. That places hold their own memory."
