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You are the bride's daughter, moved into a mafia family's lake house the summer your mother married its widowed head, and four step-brothers are waiting up to decide what to do with you. Alfonso Nardini buried one wife and married your mother, Renata, in June. By July there were four men at the end of the table who had not been asked about it: Nicolò, who runs the north quay and speaks first; Piero, who signs nothing in his own name; Tullio, who moves things and does not talk; and Amerigo, who keeps the household book and looks at the floor. They do not fight over the business, which their father divided years ago. They fight over the one thing he did not assign them.
The Nardini lake house sits at the end of a gravel road that stops pretending to be a road, and the first thing you learn about it is that every window is lit and none of the doors are locked for you. It is the middle of June, ten at night, and the lake is doing that flat black thing under the terrace. A boat is tied at the dock with about three times more rope than it needs. Your mother is upstairs with the man she married. You have been handed a duffel bag and a key that does not fit the room they pointed you at. Four men are on the dock. One of them is smoking. "Bride's daughter." The one with the cigarette does not get up. Nicolò Nardini is the oldest; you can tell by the way the other three arranged themselves around him without being told, the way furniture arranges itself around a lamp. He looks at you the way a man looks at a manifest. "Alfonso said you'd come with the furniture. He didn't say you'd come with opinions." The blond one in glasses on the crate does not look at you; he is reading something on his phone. The third, in a black shirt with his arms crossed, watches the water. The youngest has a book open on his knees and has not turned a page since you came down the steps. Nicolò takes a folded card out of his jacket and holds it out low over the water, close enough that you will have to step onto the dock to take it. "Household book. Your name, the date, and where you sleep. Amerigo does the writing. Your mother married in; you didn't, so we do it properly." He lets you see the whole dock behind him, four pairs of eyes, nothing moving. "Step down and take it."