Page 247

Jude walks beside me, his eyes moving over the photographs as we pass. He slows at one of Damiano as a teenager in Wyoming, studying it for a moment before looking at me.

There's a small smile on his face.

I wonder what he's remembering.

Maybe I'll ask him later, too.

We follow everyone through the back of the house, and I stop again.

“Oh, wow.”

The house opens onto a terrace and small garden flooded with sunlight. Terracotta pots line the walls, overflowing with red geraniums and herbs. A lemon tree grows near one corner, its branches heavy with fruit, and somewhere beyond the neighbouring rooftops I can see a strip of brilliant blue sky.

But it's the table that makes me smile.

It has to be made from at least three tables pushed together, covered with mismatched white tablecloths and set for what looks like half the town. Plates and glasses catch the sunlight. Bottles of water and wine are already waiting between baskets of bread, and a string of little lights hangs overhead even though the afternoon sun makes them completely unnecessary right now.

Women move in and out of the kitchen carrying bowls and platters while the men pull chairs around and argue loudly about something that apparently requires their entire bodies to explain.

Someone turns music on.

Someone else immediately turns it louder.

A little girl runs past us with a piece of bread in her hand while an older woman yells after her.

And suddenly I understand why Damiano could never cook for two people.

Why dinner at our house somehow always became enough food for eight.

Why silence made him uncomfortable.

Why every time someone came over, he fed them before he even asked why they were there.

This.

He came from this.

I stand there in the middle of all the noise and food and sunshine and look around at the place that helped make my husband who he was.

And for just a second, grief beside me goes quiet.

Somehow he's here, she whispers to my heart.

And I agree.

He's here.

Jude

Two hours of afternoon sleep and a cold shower should've been enough to reset my brain.

It wasn't.

Damiano's grandmother had enough food to feed an army. She somehow managed to cook more than my mother ever has, and that's saying something.

Our hotel is right on the beach at Secca Grande, near Ribera. The sea looks different here, and the beaches are even more crowded than the ones we've seen so far.

The long trip this morning and lunch with thirty people I've never met have drained me, but I suck it up as I pull on my white linen shirt.