Chapter 8: The Lawyer Is Sixteen

On Tuesday afternoon a taxi stopped at the villa gate, and the press turned toward it all at once.

A blond girl climbed out with a bag the size of a calf.

"Excuse me," she told the nearest camera in terrible Italian. "I am the lawyer."

"You're a child," said the photographer.

"A very expensive child. Move."

I saw it from my window, and I laughed for the first time in four days.

I ran down the drive and pulled Hanna through the pedestrian gate before the guard could argue.

She dropped the bag and hugged me so hard that my ribs hurt.

"You said you would be back by Friday," she said into my shoulder. "You did not say you would be on the television."

"How did you get here?"

"Train, train, bus and a very nice man with a van of cheese."

"Hanna."

"I told the headmistress my grandmother was sick."

"Your grandmother is on a cruise."

"She is sick of the cruise. It is the same thing."

I could not stop smiling, and it surprised me.

She looked past me at the villa, the long gravel drive and the white front steps.

"Oh," she said. "So this is where you are from."

Then, quietly, "It is a very big house for so few people."

"Four," I said. "Three of them are the problem."

"And the fourth?"

"I don't know yet."

The cook took one look at Hanna and decided to feed her.

By ten that night we sat side by side at the kitchen table in our socks, eating cold pasta with our fingers out of one bowl.

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