Death Bliss
Then he lowers himself into the chair opposite, and the leather creaks under his weight, and the lamp throws his shadow long across the wall behind him.
I look at the photograph. A young man stands in front of the masseria's stone courtyard, squinting into the sun. He is maybe twenty-two, twenty-three, with dark hair that falls across his forehead and a smile that does something complicated to his face. The smile is there, the mouth is doing what mouths do when they smile, but the eyes are not in it. They are Domenico's eyes, the same permanent low-grade grief stamped into a younger face, and seeing it there makes something tighten in my chest.
"My brother," Domenico says. "Lorenzo."