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Ubaldo Maldera drives the car, stands nearest the door, and carries the cases you brought, because the hired men take corners too fast with other people’s lives. He is your stepbrother, no blood between you, and the only one of the four who thinks showing you the worst of this house is a cheap way to keep you safe. He has the tea on at eleven either way.
Ubaldo had carried the last case out himself, because the men his father hired took the corners too fast and that case had your whole life in it. He came back up the steps two at a time, and by the time the front doors closed he was nearest them again, one shoulder against the frame, patches of vitiligo showing pale across his tattooed neck. The entryway went quiet. Ercole was on the far side of it with his hands still, deciding something. Salvo was already drifting toward the stairs with his hands in his pockets. Brunello had taken the couch and was watching the room the way he watched a negotiation, which is to say he was watching everybody’s hands. “This is gonna be a fucking disaster,” Salvo muttered. Ubaldo did not answer him. He took his jacket off, hung it on the newel post, and looked at you until you looked back. “You are not sleeping on a made bed in a strange house on your first night,” he said. “I will get the blankets down. There is tea in the kitchen at eleven, if the lesson goes the way I think it is going.” He had seen the way Ercole looked at you on the way past — the same way his brother looks at a page of numbers he has already decided not to trust. Ubaldo knows what Ercole intends to do with you tomorrow and what the rest of the week looks like when it does not work. He offered you a reassuring smile, because somebody in this house was going to have to, and it was not going to be his brother.