Chapter 2

The apartment smelled like Sadie had been cooking since noon.

Pasta and chicken, my favourite dish. I could tell she was busy all afternoon. 

Mamma was on the couch when I walked in. Sitting upright in the way that told me it had cost her something. She had her good headscarf on — the deep burgundy one and her eyes were bright. I felt the particular relief of it move through me quietly.

Sam looked up from the floor where he’d spread his homework across the carpet. “You’re late.”

“First day Sammy, cut me some slack.”

“You’re late.” He repeated, laughing this time. 

I stepped over his textbooks and kissed my mother’s forehead. She smelled like the hospital and her perfume underneath it, that particular combination I’d stopped noticing until I noticed it again.

I sat next to her and leaned into her shoulder the way I had when I was seven. She still felt the same. That was the part that got me, that she could feel the same and be so different underneath it.

“Sit,” she said, patting the cushion beside her. “Tell me about this job.”

The office was good. My manager seemed reasonable. A woman named Andrea at the desk beside mine who seemed like she’d be good company. All of it was true enough that I didn’t have to think about the parts I was leaving out.

She listened the way she always did. Like I was the only thing currently happening in the world.

“You always found a way,” she said. “Even when you were small. You’d figure it out and never tell anyone how.”

“I know Mamma, I know.”

Her hand found mine on the cushion. Lighter than it used to be. I didn’t let myself think about that too long. “Your father said it the first time he saw you. Said you came out already looking like you had opinions.”

Sam snorted from the floor. “Accurate.”

I threw a pillow at him.

Sam knocked over his water glass reaching for bread he didn’t need. Sadie told him to sit properly. He told her she wasn’t Mamma. Mamma laughed. Sadie tried not to. I watched all of it and said nothing. After, Sadie washed up and Sam disappeared to his room. I sat with Mamma in the quiet that followed.

“How are you really?” she asked.

“I’m managing.”

She gave me the look. The one that had never once in twenty-three years failed to make me feel eight years old.

“I’m fine, Mamma.”

“You don’t have to hold everything, Sienna.”

“Someone has to.”

She was quiet for a moment. “Your father used to say that.” Not an accusation. Just the truth, landing gently. She squeezed my hand and I let her, and we sat there until her eyes grew heavy and I helped her to bed.

I lay in my room afterward staring at the ceiling.

The insurance letter was still in my bag. I’d read it three times already — the same three lines explaining what they would cover and what they wouldn’t, written in the particular careful language of people who made a living saying no politely. The gap between those two numbers was what I was still figuring out.

The Moretti Estate - 7:00 p.m

Dinner at the estate was non-negotiable.

My father had never said so directly. He didn’t need to. Some things communicated themselves through the simple fact of their consistency — every evening, seven o’clock, the long table in the east dining room with its fourteen chairs and its particular atmosphere of a family performing itself for an audience that wasn’t there.

I arrived at six fifty-eight.

The usual faces. Associates near the entrance speak in the low register of men who never fully switch off. Guards at their posts with the mechanical patience of people who had stopped thinking about what they were protecting a long time ago. Marco caught my eye from across the foyer and gave a single nod — his version of “glad you’re here”. Max beside him lifted his chin.

Gloria was already at the table when I sat down, earphones around her neck, home from Columbia for the weekend. She was telling our mother something about a professor she found insufferable. Lucia Moretti listened with her full attention and her careful eyes, warm in the margins the way she always was — present, measured, never quite all the way out from under my father’s shadow even when he wasn’t in the room yet.

He entered at seven exactly.

Raphael Moretti didn’t announce himself. He simply arrived and the room reorganized around him. Fifty-five years old and not one thing about him had softened. He had my eyes, which I had never once considered a compliment.

Dinner passed the way it always did — controlled, efficient, the conversation moving along channels my father had predetermined without anyone acknowledging it. Gloria was the only one who spoke freely. She didn’t know enough to know what she didn’t know, and I was glad for that. I hoped it stayed that way.

“The Castello dinner,” my father said, toward the end of the meal. Not looking up from his plate. “End of October. It’ll be formal. Amelia’s father wants the betrothal to be widespread.”

I cut my meat. “Understood.”

“Good.” He finally looked up. “It’s important you’re present. Not just physically.”

I held his gaze. “I understand what you’re asking.”

He nodded once and returned to his plate. Gloria looked between us and wisely said nothing.

After, Max and I took the stairs to the roof.

The city spread out below us, indifferent and enormous. We stood there for a while without saying anything, which was the thing about Max,  he understood the value of silence. He was one of the only people in this building who did.

“Amelia’s going to push,” he said finally. “She’s not passive. She’ll try to use it.”

“I know.”

“Does that bother you?”

I thought about it honestly. “No. I understand her logic.”

Max was quiet for a moment. “Dante said something similar. Right before he left.”

The city hummed below us. I hadn’t thought about my brother in three days, which was the longest stretch in a year.

“Dante thought understanding something was the same as accepting it,” I said.

“Isn’t it?”

I didn’t answer. Max didn’t push. 

“I’m still not over his death”. I said with a low voice.” I’m certain there was foul play but I can’t prove it, not yet”

We stood there until the cold made staying pointless, and then we went back inside.

The estate never felt like home. But the roof, in the dark, with the city below us and nobody watching —that came close enough.