Chapter 18: The Rossetti Books

My mother opened the front door herself at midnight, in her grey cardigan, with her pearls on.

The porch light made her hair look silver.

She looked at me, then at Luca, and she smiled the careful smile I had known all my life.

"You came," she said. "Come in, both of you. You'll catch cold."

She kissed my cheek.

She did not mention the ball, or the slap, or Nunzio's ring in a champagne glass.

She took Luca's coat and hung it on the hook where my father's coat used to hang.

"You look very well, Luca," she said.

"So I'm told."

"Gemma says you've been unwell."

"I've been resting."

Her eyes held his a second longer than a hostess's would.

Then she smiled again and said there was soup.

I ate two spoonfuls and tasted nothing.

At one o'clock Luca went up to the guest room, and my mother went to bed, and the house settled around its old sounds.

I waited until the stairs were quiet.

Then I went to the study.

The room smelled of lemon polish and paper.

My father's desk still stood in the bay window, and the green ledgers still stood on the shelf behind it in order of year.

I had kept them since I was nineteen.

I took down the last one and sat with it under the lamp.

The numbers were mine.

Every column in my small square hand, every total checked twice.

But the supplier accounts, three pages from the back, held a line I had not written.

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