Chapter 4: Five years Back

Elettra

The first thing I noticed was the light.

It wasn't grey. It was gold, thick and warm, pouring through a window and landing across my face and bare arms. I could feel it on my eyelids. I lay there with my heart going hard and thought, so this is what happens. This is what they never tell you. It's just light.

Then a tram bell rang outside, and a man shouted something about parking, and a scooter whined down the street, and I knew those sounds in my bones. They didn't belong to heaven. They belonged to Milan on a Tuesday morning.

I opened my eyes.

The ceiling above me was cracked in one corner, shaped like a long, slow river. I'd stared at that crack every morning for two years in the little rented flat on Via Savona, before I moved to the better apartment Dario found for me. I turned my head. A pile of laundry on the chair. A coffee cup on the nightstand with a lipstick mark on the rim. A window with a cheap blue curtain that let in too much sun.

I sat up so fast the room went black.

My hands flew to my side. There was no bandage and no wound. I tore at the hem of my T-shirt and looked at my ribs; the skin was pale, smooth, and whole. I held up my left hand. No ring. I turned over my right palm, and the cuts from the broken vase were gone. Only the old faint line near my thumb from a kitchen knife I'd slipped with at fifteen.

I stared at that scar for a long time.

"No," I said out loud. "No, no."

My voice sounded strange. Lighter. Younger. I scrambled out of bed and nearly fell over the laundry, ran to the bathroom mirror, and gripped the sink with both hands.

The girl in the glass was twenty-three.

I knew that face. It was mine, but unspoiled. No shadows under the eyes. A mouth that hadn't yet learned to hold itself carefully. My hair was shorter, with the ridiculous fringe I'd cut in a fit of confidence and regretted for a year. She stared back with huge frightened eyes, the eyes of someone who hadn't yet learned what people could do.

I touched my cheek. She touched hers.

I looked for anything that said I was dreaming. A flicker, a wrong detail, a clock with no hands. There was nothing. The tap dripped in its usual rhythm, three beats and a pause, and the mirror had the same crack along its lower corner that I'd meant to fix for months. Everything was stubbornly, ordinarily true.

I don't know how long I stood there. A minute. Ten. My thoughts wouldn't hold still. They kept racing toward the villa, the radiator, the vent, the quilt, the sound on the stairs, and each time I tried to follow them I hit the same wall. I had died. I was almost sure of it. I remembered the cold, the long sinking, and the rabbit with one eye.

And yet here I was, with a pulse in my throat and a toothbrush in a cup.

I went back to the bedroom and found my phone on the nightstand. It was my old phone, the one with the cracked corner and the ugly pink case. My fingers shook so badly I dropped it twice. When the screen finally lit, it showed a date.

Tuesday, the fourteenth of March.

I read it again. Then I read the year.

It was five years ago.

I sat down on the edge of the bed because my legs wouldn't hold me. I knew that date. Not the way you know a birthday. The way you remember the first day of a sickness, the day it got into the body without your noticing. The fourteenth of March was the morning Dario first asked me to sign something. A simple property authorisation, he'd said, for the Bellagio house, so his accountant could handle the paperwork. Just a formality, amore. He looked so earnest. I was so happy that anyone wanted to take care of me.

I'd signed it that afternoon without reading a single line.

I put the phone down very gently, as if it might bite. Then I checked everything else. The calendar on the wall, a free one from the bakery downstairs. The news on my screen, a headline about a derby match I remembered and a strike on the metro. I went to the window and looked down at the corner café and the man in the green apron sweeping the pavement. All of it was right. Every detail was exactly as it had been.

It wasn't a dream. Dreams don't smell of burnt toast.

I thought of what I'd left behind, the quilt and the radiator and the silence of the house on the hill. It didn't feel like leaving. It felt like waking from a fever to find the room unchanged and everyone else still asleep.

I laughed once, a harsh broken sound. Then I pressed my hand over my mouth, slid down the wall, and wept. I wept for the girl at the villa, the quilt, and the missing button eye. I wept because I was alive and had no idea why, and because the people who killed me were somewhere across this city eating breakfast and calling me their darling. I wept until my throat ached.

When it was over, I wiped my face on my sleeve and sat there breathing.

A strange thing happened. The fear didn't go away, but something steadier settled underneath it. I'd been given a gift I didn't understand, or a punishment. It didn't matter which. I knew what was going to happen. I knew the date, the document, the names. I knew the exact shape of the trap, because I'd already walked into it.

I had one chance to walk out of it instead.

I needed to hear a voice that wasn't mine. I scrolled through my contacts, past Dario, past Mirella, past Giulia, until I reached a name I hadn't dared look at in a long time. Nonna Ines. My father's mother. She had died two autumns before the night at the villa, in a hospital bed that smelled of bleach, and Dario sat beside me three nights while I held her hand. I thought that was love. I thought a man who stayed up with you in the dark must be good.

This morning, she was alive.

I pressed call before I could think. It rang four times. I pictured her small kitchen in Bergamo, the oilcloth on the table, the radio murmuring the news, her slow walk to the old phone on the wall. I almost hung up. My chest hurt.

"Pronto?"

Her voice was dry and warm and a little cross, as if the world had interrupted something important. I couldn't speak. The sound of it went through me like a wave through sand. I pressed my knuckles against my teeth and shut my eyes.

"Pronto? Who is this? Elettra, is that you? I can hear you breathing, tesoro."

"Nonna," I managed.

"What's wrong? You sound like you're drowning."

"Nothing. Nothing's wrong. I just wanted to hear you." I wiped my face. "I miss you."

"You saw me on Sunday."

"I know. I miss you anyway."

She was quiet for a moment, and I heard the radio behind her and the small clink of a spoon against a cup. When she spoke again, her voice had softened in a way I'd forgotten. "You're a strange girl this morning. Are you eating properly? Is that boy treating you well?"

I looked at the pink phone case in my hand and thought of every lie I could tell her. I thought of the truth, and how it would sound, a girl on a cheap bed saying she'd come back from the dead.

"He's very polite," I said carefully.

"Polite." Nonna Ines made a small dry noise. "Your grandfather was polite too, and look what I put up with. Listen to me. Whatever he asks you to sign, you read it first. Every word. You hear? I've outlived four lawyers, and I've never trusted a man in a hurry."

My eyes burned.

"I'll remember that," I whispered.

"See that you do. Now go and get dressed. You'll catch a chill sitting on that cold floor."

I looked down at the floorboards under me. I hadn't told her I was sitting on the floor.

"How did you know that?" I asked.

"A mother knows," she said. "A grandmother knows twice as much. Go on. Call me tonight and tell me what he brings you for lunch."

The line went dead.

I held the phone against my chest and let myself feel it, just for a moment. She had been dead for two years in the life I'd left, and I never said goodbye properly. I'd stood at her grave in the rain and thought I would give anything for one more ordinary conversation. Now I'd had one, and she'd told me exactly what I needed to hear, and I had no idea how many more days like this I'd be allowed.

That was when the first real decision came. It arrived quietly, almost gently. I wouldn't cry on the floor any more. I wouldn't waste this. Whatever had thrown me back, I was going to use every hour of it, and the first thing I'd do was be careful.

My phone buzzed against the floor.

I flinched. For a moment I didn't want to look. Then I picked it up, and there it was on the screen, waiting for me, as it had waited every morning for five years that didn't exist yet.

Dario. 6:42 a.m.

Good morning, my love. I didn't sleep, thinking about you. I'll bring the papers by at noon, just a small formality for the Bellagio house, nothing to worry about. Sign them, and then I'll take you to lunch, wherever you like. Mirella sends her love. She says you're the daughter she always wanted.

I read it once. I read it a second time.

I remembered reading this message the first time. I remembered smiling at it, warm and foolish, curled up in this same bed in this same blue light. I'd texted back a row of hearts. I'd told my friend Giulia I was the luckiest girl in Milan.

But I'd never noticed the last line. Not once, in all the years I reread these old messages, did I miss him. Mirella sends her love. At this point in my life, I'd barely met Mirella. Dario and I had been together three months, and I'd taken him to the villa only once, for a stiff, polite lunch. Why would she send love? Why would she say anything about me at all?

She says you're the daughter she always wanted.

I looked at the words for a long time. They didn't feel like kindness anymore. They felt like a hook sunk quietly under the skin, put there before I ever knew I was being fished for.

The phone lit again in my hand. Another message, shorter.

Wear the green dress. I love you in it.