Chapter 43
“Your mother wrote that she loved you,” she said. “You didn’t need a key to know that.”
“No,” he said. “But I needed one to believe it.”
She took the medallion and put it around her neck.
They stood at the grave a while longer, and the elms moved, and the light came down through the leaves in pieces.
“Do you think she’d have liked me?” Allesia asked.
Dante considered it.
“She’d have made you stay for dinner,” he said. “She’d have asked you fifty questions and remembered every answer, and she’d have written your name in a letter to me two weeks later and told me not to ruin it.”
“Not to ruin what?”
“Whatever it was,” Dante said. “She was very good at seeing things before they happened.”
Allesia laughed, quietly, and the sound went out over the stones and came back to them.
They drove home in the late afternoon, and the city came up on the skyline, gray and silver and enormous, and the house waited at the end of the road with its windows lit.
That evening, Allesia went to the small room at the end of the west corridor.
The door was open now — it was always open. The lamp was on. The photograph of Bianca sat on the desk with the baby in her arms, and the room smelled of paper and lemon oil and the faint, almost-gone ghost of an old perfume.
She stood in the doorway for a moment.
Then she went in, and she sat down at the desk, and she looked at the photograph, and she thought about a woman she had never met who had written her name on the back of a picture and hidden it away to keep her safe.
The corridor was quiet. The house was quiet. Somewhere downstairs, Dante was in the study with the door open, because he did that now.
Allesia reached up and touched the medallion at her throat.
Then she got up and turned off the lamp and left the door open behind her, and the light from the corridor fell across the desk and the photograph and stayed there.
THE END