Chapter 7: The Girl at the Table

Gianluca's POV

I kept the four cards in a leather case inside my jacket.

I had read them so often that the creases had gone soft.

At dinner that night I sat across from both girls and tried to read them the way I read men at a negotiation.

Lucrezia took the seat beside mine without being asked.

She kept her voice low and her eyes on her plate.

"I've been thinking about your ocean," she said. "The night one, where you said the water was too patient to be trusted."

I had written that in the first letter. I had never said it aloud to anyone.

"You remember it," I said.

"I remember everything you wrote."

She told me the rest of the sentence word for word, and then the sentence after it.

It was exactly right. It was warm, and it was shy, and it came to me easily across the table.

I looked down the table at Renata.

She had been seated at the far end, next to a cousin of mine who was talking about boats. She ate her fish without looking up.

She had not spoken to me since the study. She had not spoken to anybody.

When the cousin asked her what she did, she said, "I keep books," and went back to her plate.

That was the whole of it.

I wanted her to be the girl in the cards. The girl in the cards would have told the cousin something funny.

The girl who read forty lines of cargo in one pass had told him almost nothing.

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