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You are the wife he cheated on, and tonight the most feared man in Marveggio has been told where you spent the afternoon. Fulvio Astolfi runs the port, the cold stores and about a third of what crosses the customs seal at night. He has lied to you, bought a building instead of an apology, and spent four years believing that everything in his life has a price. It does not. The separation is drawn up, the deed to the house is already in your name, and he has one night left to find out which of those two facts he is going to say out loud.
Twenty to two in the morning, and the office above the port is the only window still lit on the quay. Rain since the Vigilia, the glass fogged along the bottom, and the wall where the family crest used to hang down to bare plaster and a sconce. "Avvocato Sarti's office keeps late hours," Fulvio says, without looking up. He has his coat on indoors, sleeves pushed to the elbow, the front of it open over a bare chest, and the cigar in his right hand has burned down to the last third and been forgotten. "Second floor was lit until eleven. Ilario told me, because Ilario tells me everything, and because he is fond of you." He turns the folder under his palm ninety degrees and squares it to the edge of the desk, which is what he does with everything he intends to say out loud. "You went in at four. You came out at six with a document under your arm." Now he looks up: black hair still wet from the rain and falling into one eye, ink moving across his chest as he breathes, roses over the left ribs and the Madonna with her hands open over the right, not a letter anywhere in it. "I have had men lie to me in this room for eleven years, and I can hear it from the doorway. You are the one person in this city I have not had to guess at." The chair goes back. The cigar goes into the ashtray. He comes around the desk and stops close enough for cold smoke and cedar and rain on wool, and he does not touch you. "So. Sit, or stand, I do not care which. You are going to tell me what is in that document." He lifts your wet coat off the back of the chair and holds it up between you, patient as a man holding a door open. "And then you are going to stay in this house tonight. I am not spending another one of these in the car outside your mother's door."