Chapter 14: Her Father's Coat

The garden door on the lemon side of the villa had been sticking since I was nine.

I put my shoulder to it, and it opened.

Nobody had changed the lock, because nobody in my family had ever imagined an Ardizzone locking out another one.

The hall was dark, and a man was sitting in the chair by the stairs.

It was the head of my brother's guard, and he had Massimo's gun in his belt.

He looked at me for a long moment.

"I was asleep, signora," he said, and shut his eyes.

I went up the stairs on the sides of my feet.

My own room was exactly as I had left it, even to the book face down on the pillow.

The sewing box sat on the shelf over the desk, a flat walnut case with my mother's initials on the lid.

I took it down and pressed the corner, and the bottom slid open.

I had found that trick when I was twelve and hunting for sweets.

Underneath lay a folded letter in my mother's hand, and it had never been sent.

I did not read it there.

I carried the box down the hall to my father's study, because there was something else I wanted to see.

The key was where it had always been, inside the case of the clock.

The study smelled of cigars and old paper.

In the closet behind the desk, in a bag from a Palermo dry cleaner, hung a gray overcoat.