Chapter 4

The blood oath I swore at his grave in Palermo is still fresh in my mind, the words I said with my hand on the stone and my uncle's hand on my shoulder, the promise to use the family's machinery to find the men who killed him and make them answer for it. I believed, when I swore it, that the oath was a straight line from my grief to justice. I believed the syndicate was still the thing my father built, a structure of loyalty and obligation and blood that held its shape because everyone inside it agreed on what the shape was. I am beginning to understand that ten years is a long time to be away, and that the shape may have changed while I was not looking.

I walk through the courtyard toward the study. The study is at the back of the house, a small room with a window that looks out over the olive groves and a desk that belonged to my father, and on the desk there is a telephone and a ledger and the leather folder that Matteo placed there three minutes ago. I open the folder. I take out the pouch. I unzip it and look at the American's phone and her passport, and I turn the passport over in my hands. The cover is worn at the edges. She has traveled before, but not much. The photo inside shows a younger version of her face, the same sharp brown eyes and the same stillness, and I wonder what she was looking at when the photograph was taken. Something she was trying to read, probably. Something she was trying to understand.

I put the passport back in the pouch and zip it closed. The phone I leave on the desk, because I want to see if it rings. I want to know who calls her, and how long it takes them to notice she is gone.

The window is open. The heat comes through it in waves, carrying the smell of the olive trees and the dry grass and the distant salt of the Adriatic, and I stand at the window and watch the road. The unpaved road, the only road, the road that climbs through the groves and disappears into the haze at the bottom of the hill. It is the road I came back on three days ago, and it is the road she arrived on an hour ago, and it is the road that neither of us can take out again. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time.

I hear footsteps in the corridor. Matteo, coming to tell me that the American is settled in her quarters, that she has asked for water and a map of the archives and the name of the person she is meant to report to. I already know what I am going to tell him. I am going to tell him to let her wait. I am going to tell him that I will receive her in the courtyard when I am ready, and not before.

I need time to decide what she is. Collateral, my uncle called her. A bargaining chip, a piece of leverage against the debt her family owes us, a thing to be held and spent when the moment is right. But I watched her hand close around the empty pocket where her phone was, and I watched her count the windows, and I am no longer sure that my uncle and I mean the same thing when we use that word.

A bargaining chip does not look at a locked gate the way she looked at it. A bargaining chip does not make you want to know what she was reading in the iron and the stone.

I close the window. The heat stays in the room, pressing against the glass, and I sit down at my father's desk and wait for Matteo to knock. The pouch with her passport and her phone is in the top drawer now, locked, and the key is in my pocket, and the unpaved road is empty in the afternoon sun.

Somewhere in the house, a door opens and closes. Water runs through the old pipes, a sound I remember from childhood, the groan of the plumbing when someone draws a bath or fills a basin. She is washing the dust off her face. She is unpacking her canvas bag in a room that does not have a lock on the door. She is still cataloguing, I think, still counting the windows and the exits and the things that might be useful later, and I realize that I want to know what she finds. I want to know what she sees when she looks at this place, this house of old stone and older secrets, this house that has been waiting for me to come back and claim it.

I want to know if she sees the same thing I see, or if she sees something else entirely.

The knock comes. Matteo opens the door without waiting for an answer, because he has been with the household for forty years and he does not need permission to enter a room he has been entering since before I was born.

"The American is settled," he says in Italian. "She asked for a map of the archives."

"Did she ask for anything else?"

"Water. And the name of the person she is meant to report to."

I turn the key in the desk drawer and stand up. "Tell her she reports to me," I say. "Tell her I will meet her in the courtyard in one hour."

Matteo nods. He does not ask why I am keeping her waiting. He does not ask what I was doing in the gatehouse arch when she arrived, or why I watched her for so long before she saw me. He has been with the family for forty years, and he knows better than to ask questions that do not have answers yet.

He leaves. I stay at the desk for another minute, listening to the house settle around me, the old stone contracting in the heat, the swallows still working in the eaves, the distant sound of a door closing somewhere in the guest wing. Then I walk out into the corridor and toward the courtyard, where the sun is bleaching the white limestone and the olive trees are stirring in the wind from the sea, and where Serafina Bellini will be waiting for me in one hour with her sharp brown eyes and her cataloguing and her hand that closed around an empty pocket like she was already learning the shape of what she had lost.