"Because I'd never smiled like this," I answered, my head on his chest. "With anyone."
We stayed in bed until the sun went down.
Talking nonsense, the kind of nonsense I'd never talked with anyone.
Whether it would be a boy or a girl, his name or hers. Luca wanted a name that didn't belong to anyone dead—"no Marco, no Lucia, a child doesn't carry a ghost."
I agreed. We kept making up names and laughing at the bad ones.
At some point, he talked about turning his dead mother's room—my old room, the nonna's now, when she came—into a child's room. "The nonna will understand. She'll want it."
"Capri tomorrow," he reminded me, his hand on my belly.
"Capri tomorrow," I repeated.
I laid my head on his chest. I listened to his heart, slow now, under my ear.
The house silent—not war silence. Peace silence.
I'd never laughed in a man's bed, I thought. My whole life I'd believed sex was a serious thing, or a dangerous one, or both.
No one had told me that with the right person it's also funny.
That you can lose the rhythm and laugh. That he can talk nonsense to my belly and I can smack his shoulder. That you can be happy—just like that, simple, with no ghost in the bed.
I closed my eyes. And for the first time in my life, I wasn't afraid to be happy.
CHAPTER 47
"I went back to the house where my brother was a prisoner. Everything depends on who walks in with you."
Valentina MORETTI
The crossing to Capri was different this time.
The first time I crossed that sea—months ago, on the yacht, with Luca—we were going to rescue Matteo from the pink house.
I'd dreamed of my brother three times the night before, had carried the dagger in my boot with my heart clenched up in my collarbone the whole way.
This time there was no hurry, no fear. Luca held my hand on the deck, the wind blew through my hair, and the only thing I carried was his child inside me.
The pink house appeared on the climb up the Via Tragara.
The same house. Faded pink walls, windows with green shutters, the bougainvillea at the entrance. The house where my brother had spent two months a prisoner, with Donna Carmela deaf in her right ear and the books Acquaviva brought, faking friendship.
Now it was open, windows wide. Donna Pia at the door, a clean apron, and a smile.
The same house, I thought, climbing the stone stairs. But it isn't the same house anymore.
The nonna was in the garden.
And she was different in Capri. In Posillipo she was the matriarch in black, the cane, the eyes that cut. Here, on her own ground, in the garden of the house where she'd lived her whole life, she seemed lighter.
The shawl on her shoulders, her feet in an old garden clog, the cane propped against a rosebush while she cut rosemary with little scissors.
"Signora," she said, without turning. "You're here."
"Nonna."
