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around me, his chest heaving with sobs. I thought to myself that the last time I’d seen him like this was at my mother’s funeral.
    “How awful, Francesco. I can’t believe it.”
    “Take him home,” Mele told him, draping over my shoulders a blanket he had picked up from an easy chair. Giovanna’s scent wafted up from the cover; I hugged it to my body like a second skin. It was her favorite blanket. In the winter, she’d curl up in her armchair, wrapped in that sky-blue cashmere blanket.
    Papa helped me into his Jaguar. “I’ll take you to the villa.”
    “No. I want to go home. I need to be alone.”
    Outside of my house, he held one of my hands in both of his. “I’m sorry your mother can’t be here right now. She would have known the words to comfort you.”
    My mother. The most important women in my life were both dead. I was crushed by a collapsing wall of grief. I wished I could pass out, plunge into unconsciousness, but I felt strangely lucid.
    “Can you tell Prunella?” I asked.
    “Of course. I’ll do it right away.”
    Prunella, the “white widow”—slang for a woman whose husband was far, far away, and as good as dead. She’d already lost her husband, and now she’d lost her daughter and only child.
    Her family had been the most important family in town until her husband, Alvise, had managed to squander a fortune playing roulette in the casinos of Slovenia and Croatia. Two hours by car. He’d leave the house after dinner and return home the next morning, coming back a little poorer from each trip. Until he wound up in prison on arson charges, for having set fire to his own factory. He had hoped to use the money from the insurance to pay off his debts with the banks. It might have worked out, too, if the fire hadn’t killed the night watchman, his wife, and their baby girl. After he served his time in prison, he vanished, and no one knew where he had fled. Prunella was left alone, to raise Giovanna. In town, she was known as the widow Barovier. To everyone in town, Alvise was dead.
    Prunella, who had once been an arrogant snob, took refuge in religion, her sole comfort against her grief and shame at her loss of social standing.
    She was a good woman.
    I took Giovanna’s blanket off my shoulders and carefully folded it. Then I took off my clothes and dried myself with a towel. I had just put on a fresh change of clothes when I heard a knock at the door.
    It was Don Piero. Good old Don Piero. He was eighty years old, but as chipper and vigorous as always. He had retired years ago, but he’d never abandoned the rectory, where he lived with his elderly housekeeper, who was only a few years younger than him. The new parish priest, a blond Croatian who had tried without success to speak in dialect to bridge the distance with his parishioners, had been obliged to settle for a little apartment in the church hall. Don Piero was still the uncontested master of the souls of the town, and so he would remain until the day he died. There was no bishop persuasive enough to jolly him into a nursing home.
    He leveled his dark eyes at me, looking directly into my own. He patted my face with a rough hand, and sank down onto a chair.
    “The good Lord has decided to test you, Francesco,” he began in pure dialect. “And he’s testing the heart of this old priest, too. Poor Giovanna, she was unlucky in life. I had hoped that you could bring her a little peace, but the Lord decided differently. He took her away from us. He decided to gather her to His side. We understand this, isn’t that true?”
    Don Piero took in the grief and incredulity in my eyes. “Only God can help you through this moment. Surrender to His love, Francesco. Otherwise this grief will become intolerable.”
    He stood up and headed for the door. Then he thought of something and turned back toward me. “You, Giovanna, and Filippo. You’ve always had more than the others, but the Lord has reserved a painful existence for all three of