Page 111 of Saltwater

Even the idea of July in Milan—sticky with heat and agog with visitors clustered around the Duomo—cannot dissuade me from this plan. It feels like I’ve already waited years.

“Can you text her now?” I ask.

At thirty-three, I feel as if I am just being born into the world. The newness both thrilling and terrifying. Were it not for Ciro and Renata, my body feels like it might float away, carried on a sea of optimism and money.

Not that there isn’t guilt. It’s there, lurking at the edges of my happiness—the fact that I haven’t mourned the loss of Marcus, my real father. The fact that I have declined to provide an address at which my father can write me. The fact that, in the end, I was more like Naomi than I ever suspected. Perhaps that part of me, the Lingate part, can be buried now. Submerged, drowned. They may have been my family, but what does that really mean?Family.Maybe I would rather use that word for Renata and Ciro. Maybe I already have.

“She says she will find us options by next week,” Ciro says, looking up from his phone.

“Will you be leaving so soon?” Renata asks.

She carries a tray—beers, a carafe of water, a bowl of olives, and a plate of chips—out to us.

“You will come visit,” Ciro says, “as soon as the high season ends.”

“Yes,” she says. She sits, picks up a beer that’s sweating with condensation, and sips. “I think this season will be my last.”

“But you never leave Capri,” Ciro says.

Renata shrugs. “The world comes here, but I miss going out and seeing the world, too.”

I imagine a future in which Ciro and I have children and Renata lives close by, a future in which there will be no army of nannies and housekeepers, just life as I always wanted to experience it. It does nottake the balance sheet Bud sent me earlier to have that kind of life, I know that. But it will make it easier, and I am grateful.

Perhaps I will discover how quickly one can become like my grandfather and spend it all, turn a large fortune into a small one. It seems impossible to think that I might spend it all. But we will spend some.

“I’ll get train tickets,” Ciro says. “A boat to Naples.”

It would be easy for us to take the helicopter that took Bud yesterday, or a private plane, but the train is more romantic.

“Can we go tomorrow?” I ask.

“Or the day after,” he says.

I grin. I am giddy. I wonder how I let them keep me from this—him, Italy. Maybe itisbetter than money. Only now I won’t have to decide.

“Would you mind running next door to get us some champagne?” Renata asks Ciro. “There should be some cold, stored in the refrigerator. I doubt anyone will mind if we borrow a bottle. Considering.”

Ciro kisses me. He slips back into the garden of the villa, bound for the kitchen. And despite the joy, part of me aches for Lorna, who will never know this, who came so close. I wonder, if she had lived, if she and Freddy might have had the baby, if they might have figured out a way to make it work. If they might have been the two to go home together.

As soon as Ciro is gone, Renata reaches across the table and sets a hand on my arm.

“It shouldn’t have taken this,” she says. “They should have let you go sooner. Let you have some space from them, from what they wanted.”

Then she points at the necklace, the collar of snakes I’m wearing, have been wearing almost every day, and she says:

“But at least it did what it was supposed to do.”

“What do you mean?” I say. I finger the metal, warmed by my skin. But I know what she means: it’s a talisman. It has to be.

“Your mother loved that necklace,” she says. “Even though it was part of your father’s family, purchased by your great-grandfather in afit of collecting in the early 1920s. Back when looted antiquities and plenty of fakes were widely available on the market. He was an undiscerning man. If it looked old, he bought it. The broker who sold him that necklace said that it had been forged in Vulcan’s fire by his own hand. That it had been found in the remains of a house somewhere in Phocis. But your mother always knew it was tin. It only made her love it more.”

“Do you know who sent it?” I ask, holding a hand to the warm metal, feeling the scales under the soft pads of my fingers. The temperature of my chest, of the necklace, seems to be increasing, growing hotter as I wait for Renata’s response.

“I did,” she finally says.

“But they never found it,” I say.

And I can see my father’s face the first time he saw it, how desperately he wanted to escape the coiling snakes and their unblinking eyes. How happy he must have been to have them lost at sea.

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