Three days. That's what the wedding planner says, tapping her clipboard, as if I might have lost count. In three days my father marries Livia's mother at a winery in South Tyrol, and I am Raffael, twenty-nine, best man and the only photographer they could afford, and Livia is standing at the reception desk telling the clerk there has been a mistake.
“One room,” she says, for the third time. “Under both names.”
“It's a double,” the clerk says, hopeful.
Outside, the vineyards of South Tyrol stretch up to the mountain. I open the window because I need to do something with my hands. I'm a photographer. I know how to create distance: through a lens. I don't take out the camera.
“Your mother approved the list. Shared responsibility.”
“Fine.” She takes the key. “You get the floor.”
The room has a balcony over the vines and one bed the size of a small country. Livia claims the bathroom for forty minutes. I unpack my lenses on the desk and try not to think about the next three nights or about the fact that in seventy-two hours she becomes my stepsister and this becomes a story we can never tell. When she comes out, her hair is wet and she is wearing a T-shirt I recognise from a band we argued about in the car. She sits on the edge of the bed, looks at the pillows I've laid out on the floor, then at me. “That's ridiculous,” she says. “It's a big bed.” She doesn't move over. She doesn't need to. The offer is in the room now, and she's waiting to see if I'm brave enough to hear it.
