The ledgers are in the piano bench. Nobody looks in a piano bench, and my husband knew it, and now I know it, and that is the whole of my inheritance. I am Chiara, thirty-five, a widow for six weeks in a house above Naples that is too big for one woman and exactly the right size for her fear.
The car comes up the drive at nine. Black, unhurried. I knew it would come eventually. I didn't know it would be him.
Dante. My husband's second, now his successor, the man who stood behind him at every dinner and never once sat down. He comes to the door alone, which is either respect or a message, and he takes off his hat, which is both.
“Signora.” He looks past me into the hall, taking inventory the way men like him do. “I've come to offer you my protection.”
“I have a gate.”
“You have a gate and no one behind it.” He doesn't step forward. He waits to be asked, and I understand that the asking is the point. If I let him in, it is my choice, and he wants it to be. “There are people who believe your husband kept records,” he says. “They will come. Some of them won't take off their hats.”
He knows. Or he is guessing, and the guess is good enough. Behind me in the salon the piano sits with its lid down and its bench full of enough to bury him and everyone he answers to, and he is standing on my step, patient, dark-eyed, offering me a wall to hide behind that has his name carved into it.
“Coffee,” I say. “Not protection. Coffee, and then we'll see.” He smiles for the first time, and it is not a safe smile, and he steps over my threshold as if he has been waiting weeks to be allowed to.
