Chapter 1

I set the coffee cup down on a stack of Sicilian land deeds and watch the steam curl upward into the morning light that cuts through the kitchen window. The cup is the same one I have used since I was fifteen, a heavy ceramic thing with a hairline crack running from rim to base, and I know exactly where to place my thumb so the heat does not reach the fracture. Below me, through the worn linoleum, the catering kitchen is already alive. Garlic hits the hot oil in the big steel pans, a sound I have been hearing since I could stand on a stool and watch my father work, and the smell rises through the floorboards the way it always does, sharp and familiar and a little tired.

The deed in front of me is from 1923. I have been translating it for the better part of an hour, my pen moving in the margins, turning the formal Italian of a long-dead notary into English that a Manhattan lawyer can bill for. The property in question is a small vineyard outside Marsala, and the clause I keep circling back to is the one that gives the lender the right to claim the harvest for seven years if the borrower misses a single payment. Seven years. The borrower signed it. I set my pen down and press my thumb against the crack in the cup.

Enzo is at the stove, his back to me, stirring something that does not need stirring. He has been at the stove for ten minutes, and the eggs in the pan are done, and he is still stirring them. I watch his shoulders. He holds them the way a man holds an umbrella in a storm he did not check the forecast for.

"The lender in this one took the whole harvest for seven years," I say. "One missed payment."

He does not turn. "That's how those guys operated back then."

"It is how they operate now."

The spoon stops moving. Then it starts again, a little faster. "You want more coffee?"

I let the silence sit between us for three full seconds. I am good at silence. I learned it from my mother, not because she taught me but because she left, and the space she left behind was a quiet thing that no one in this apartment knew how to fill. I was twelve. I filled it with books, with languages, with the clean precision of other people's words on a page. Words do not leave.

"I want you to answer the question I asked," I say.

"You didn't ask a question."

"I was about to."

Enzo turns then, finally, the spatula still in his hand. He is lanky and rumpled in the way he has always been, his dark hair standing up in the back where he has been running his fingers through it. He has our father's eyes, the Bellini brown that our mother used to call espresso-dark, but on him they look borrowed. He carries them like a coat he is waiting to grow into. "Ask it, then."

"The catering order for the Giordano wedding. It got cancelled."

"Rescheduled."

"It got cancelled and the deposit was not refunded."

He sets the spatula down on the edge of the pan, and the handle tips and clatters against the burner grate. He does not pick it up. "Look, Fina, there are things with the business right now that are complicated."

"Complicated."

"I'm handling it."

I pick up my pen again. I do not write anything. I just hold it. "The Giordanos paid in advance. That money was in the account last month. It is not there now."

"You've been looking at the accounts?"

"Someone has to."

His jaw tightens, and for a moment he looks like our father, the version of our father from five years ago when the business was still a business and not a slow bleed. Then the resemblance passes, and he is just Enzo again, my brother who cracks his knuckles one by one whenever a plan is about to go wrong. He does it now, the joints popping in sequence, left hand then right. "I borrowed some money. To cover the van repair and the supplier invoices. I'll pay it back."

"From who."

"It's handled."

"Enzo."

"I said it's handled." He picks up the spatula and turns back to the stove, and the eggs are definitely burning now, the edges going brown and crisp. "You don't have to worry about it. You've got your translation work. You've got your life. I'm handling the family stuff."

I file the answer away. I am good at that too. I have been filing away Enzo's half-sentences and turned shoulders since I was old enough to understand that some questions make people flinch, and a flinch is its own kind of answer. The deed in front of me is still waiting, its predatory clause circled in blue ink, and I think about the farmer in 1923 who signed away seven harvests because he believed he would never miss a payment. People believe all kinds of things.