Chapter 9: Verona
Giulia Rossi met them at the arrivals gate with a sign that said MILLER in large, slightly crooked letters, which made Lily laugh so hard she had to hold her rabbit with both hands.
She was Leo's younger sister by four years — shorter than Beatrice had imagined, with the same dark eyes as her brother but none of his stillness.
Giulia moved the way people move when they have decided that life is short and standing still is a waste of it.
"You must be Beatrice," she said, and kissed her on both cheeks before Beatrice could prepare for it.
"Leo told me what you did.
I would have kissed you harder but you look like it might hurt."
Beatrice touched her bandaged hand automatically.
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine, but you will be." Giulia crouched down to Lily's level.
"And you.
You are enormous.
The last time I saw you, you came up to my knee."
"I'm six," Lily said seriously.
"Six!
Practically grown." Giulia stood.
"Come.
The car is outside and the house is warm and I made soup because I didn't know what else to do and soup is always correct."
The house was forty minutes outside the city, up a winding road lined with cypress trees that Lily watched with great attention, as if cataloguing them for later.
It was old and slightly uneven and full of the particular warmth of a house that has been lived in for a long time by someone who knows how to make a place feel like itself.
The lemon trees were in the back garden.
Lily saw them through the kitchen window and made a sound that required no translation.
"After soup," Giulia said firmly.
They had soup.
Lily ate two bowls and fell asleep on the sitting room sofa before the bowls were washed, the rabbit tucked under her chin, her drawing things still in the bag beside her, unpacked and waiting.
Giulia covered her with a blanket.
She and Beatrice sat at the kitchen table with wine — a local red that Giulia poured without asking — and for a moment neither of them said anything.
"Leo called this morning," Giulia said.
"Before you landed.
He told me about the warrant.
About Kensington."
"And?"
"And he told me about you." Giulia looked at her over the rim of her glass.
"Not just tonight.
He told me about the last three years.
The things he'd noticed.
The things he hadn't noticed until he started paying attention."
Beatrice looked at her wine.
"He said you told him that furniture has ears," Giulia said.
"I did."
"He said he laughed.
He said he hadn't laughed in a long time." Giulia set her glass down.
"My brother has not laughed easily since Elena.
I want you to know that."
The kitchen was warm.
Outside, the cypress trees moved in a light wind.
"How is he?" Beatrice asked.
She hadn't meant to ask it.
It came out anyway.
"Frightened," Giulia said simply.
"Not of Kensington.
He's handled worse than Kensington.
Frightened of—" She paused.
"Of what almost happened.
Of how close it was.
Of how long it was happening under his roof and he didn't see it." She looked at Beatrice steadily.
"Of losing someone else."
Beatrice was quiet.
"He's coming tomorrow," Giulia said.
"He moved the timeline.
The task force has everything they need and he is not going to wait forty-eight hours."
Something in Beatrice's chest shifted.
She kept her face still.
"Good," she said.
"Lily will be glad."
Giulia smiled — a small, knowing smile that Beatrice chose not to examine too closely.
"Yes," Giulia said.
"Lily will be very glad."
They finished the wine.
Beatrice checked on Lily twice before she went to bed — once to tuck the blanket more firmly, once because she simply needed to see the small chest rising and falling.
She slept in the room next to Lily's.
The bed was old and slightly soft and the pillow smelled of lavender.
She had not slept in a bed that smelled of lavender since her mother's house in Coventry.
She thought of Dorothy Miller, seventy-one, bad hip, garden she couldn't stop fussing over.
She thought of the two men Leo had sent to her door, and hoped they had accepted the tea.
She thought of the message on her phone.
*This isn't over yet.*
She would tell Leo in the morning.
Face to face.
May you like
She closed her eyes.
She slept.
