Catching Chiara’s eye, Fabrizio stepped over the dog to approach her. He reached out his hand, and Chiara took it for a moment before lifting their intertwined hands to kiss his fingers. Ignoring the whispers, the two of them began collecting the spent fire extinguishers to stack them by the steps. While Chiara was still troubled by questions about how to navigate this relationship when Fabrizio returned to Bologna at the end of the month, she tried to focus on this, now. This moment of fragile peace.
Dante stood in the center of the clearing, hands on his hips. Hearing a muted snickering behind him, he whirled and glared at Fabio. Fabio suppressed his laugh and looked chastened, plunging his brush into the bucket of soapy water.
Patrizia and Giuseppe made their way into the clearing. The butcher held his wife against him as her eyes welled with tears. When she saw Chiara standing closer to Fabrizio than strictly necessary, she smiled and moved to greet them. Giuseppe approached Dante and asked about the rumors that the owner of the castle had been in contact, angry about the news of the fire on his property. Dante nodded in affirmation, and said that the owner was planning to fly in from New York City to assess the damage.
Magda hugged the wall as she arrived, her face alert for any sign of suspicion or blame. Most faces slid past her, intent on their tasks, a few nodded perfunctorily, accepting her place among them. She released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and joined Giovanni and Rosetta, who were folding the unburnt tables and resting them against the wall.
Vale appeared briefly at the entrance to the castle, but spying Dante, he hung his head and retreated back down the steps. Stella was absent. She’d left Santa Lucia late in the night. Rumor was she’d moved in with her eldest daughter.
Sauro the baker arrived and helped Paola, the owner of the produce market, sweep ash and bits of coal. They paused to lean on their brooms as they gazed over the groves. Anyone who has loved an olive tree will empathize with the hammer to the chest at the sight of those burnt groves. No, the trees weren’t theirs, but they were cousins to theirs. Paola blinked back tears. She turned her head to return to work, but her vision was caught by Luciano arriving with Isotta and Elisa. She watched them for a few moments, biting her lip, before she returned to her sweeping.
As they entered the clearing, Elisa’s eyes glimmered. Luciano leaned down and reminded her of what the doctors said—it was very possible that Fatima would recover. She was stronger than almost anyone knew. They needed to keep thinking positively and sending her prayers. Elisa bit her lip and nodded. Isotta squeezed her hand. Elisa closed her eyes briefly, and then smiled up at Isotta. She accepted the rake Luciano held out to her and stepped to the edge of the groves to rake the burnt rosemary branches.
Along with the mingled images of Fatima strangled in smoke and lying in her pristine hospital bed, Elisa couldn’t help scanning the assembled townspeople. Was her real mother here, now? Or her father? Did they know her? Had they stayed away from her all these years because they didn’t care? Or were they waiting for an opportunity to talk to her? Was it someone she knew? What if it was someone she hated? What if it was someone she loved? Her mind was in knots, she wished she had Fatima to talk it out with. Fatima would find a way to make her laugh and wonder at the same time.
Now that Carlo was gone, Elisa wondered if she could persuade her mother to tell her the truth about her parentage. But not yet. Her mother was still broken and worried about how to support the household. Her brothers—the three of them agreed that no revelations about bloodlines would divide their sense of kinship, they would always be her brothers—maintained that their lives would only improve with Carlo gone. She was inclined to believe them.
Standing beside Elisa, Isotta searched for Massimo or Anna. Her argument with Massimo that had rung through the quiet streets of Santa Lucia seemed to have shamed him and his mother into staying home. Isotta breathed a sigh of relief, but she found herself regretting not seeing Margherita. After Massimo had left, she’d cried with Luciano, realizing that leaving Massimo meant leaving the little girl that had come to feel like her own. She struggled with feeling powerless in the face of a wash of regret. Could she still see Margherita, without seeing Massimo? Was Massimo willing to change, to see her for who she was? Could he really love her as herself and not the glimmer of his wife dead and buried as he’d insisted last night? Or was the whole relationship too rotten to ever recover? And, then her mind cycled back to the most painful question—could she keep Margherita in her life?
At the thought, her stomach lurched. She’d tried to quiet her nausea this morning with plain toasted bread, but she still felt the threat of bile rising in her throat. It must be nerves.
Unless . . . her hand fluttered to her belly and she began furiously calculating the days that had slipped by her, tangling, uncounted.
A wisp of wind, fresh as innocence itself, began moving between and through the townspeople. Arching into the sky, the breeze, more confident now, thinned the bulky heft of the clouds, stretching them into a hazy veneer. The sky seemed to twist on itself, opening a circlet in the shifting veil. For a brief moment, the edges of the aperture glowed brilliantly around a stretch of sky the exact blue of the Madonna’s niche. A cascade of light flowed through the rippling air to warm the assembled faces, lifted in greeting. All around, gnarled