Chapter 11: The Long Table

The Castellani villa stood on a hill above Rapallo behind a black iron gate.

I had been inside it forty times as Dario's fiancée.

Tonight I walked through the front door beside his brother.

Nobody took my coat.

The long table ran down the middle of the dining hall under a dark wooden ceiling.

Twelve old men sat along both sides of it in black suits.

They were the heads of the families who answered to the Castellani, and not one of them was smiling.

At the head of the table sat Agnese.

At the foot sat Dario, with Ilaria beside him in a black dress, her eyes red.

He had changed his suit.

He had washed his face.

He sat at the table and smiled at the old men as if it were any dinner.

Agnese lifted one finger, and the whole room fell silent.

"Ettore," she said. "Sit at your father's place."

There was an empty chair at her right hand.

Ettore looked at it for a moment.

Then he pulled it out and sat down, and the old men breathed out as one.

"Mamma," Dario said, with a laugh that did not work. "You cannot be serious. The man is an impostor."

"Is he?"

"I carried the coffin."

"You carried a box," said Agnese. "I made you do it."

"I buried my son in an empty box and told myself he was gone. Let us see if it was the box that was wrong."

She turned her head toward her younger son.

"Take off the watch, Dario."

"It is my father's watch."

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