Page 79 of Saltwater

“Can we slow down?”Freddy says when we merge onto the Via Tragara, swarmed by bodies moving from the funicular to the viewing point and back. I’ve always loved that about Capri—the crowds are contained. It’s like Venice that way. Two blocks off a main thoroughfare and it’s so silent it’s easy to believe you’re completely alone. The true luxury is always down the narrowest, quietest streets. The ones with the best views, the biggest palms, the obscuring tangle of fig trees.

“I didn’t realize—” I say.

I match his pace and spare a look behind us, but no one is there, even though I feel like someone should be. As if there are eyes on my back, even though the police surveillance only lasted that first day, even though my family is back at the villa. Freddy reaches for my hand.

We wind through knots of people moving from boutique to boutique as the shopping district takes shape. Reflective windows and fluttering, domed awnings shelter people who look just like us—discreetly hidden behind enormous sunglasses and hats. I pull my hat off and scrabble my hair into a ponytail. I don’t know why it matters, but it does. I’m sick of hiding things.Let them see,I think.

At the Piazzetta, we slip onto a side street lined with jewelry shops, the glitter in the windows matching the glint of the sun against the flat plane of the Mediterranean. Freddy holds one of the doors open, and an older man behind the counter—his hair shock white and his suit neatly pressed—greets us. The air-conditioning takes my breath away; my sweat congeals on my skin. He holds out his hand and I grasp it.

“Tomasso,” he says, pointing at himself. Then he gestures to a table in the corner. “Please, sit.”

On my way over, I peer into cases full of glinting stones. My mother’s necklace looks nothing like this. But my father never bought her anything new. Everything she had, everythingIhave, came from my great-grandmother, my grandmother. There are photos of them wearing the same pieces, generation after generation. The jewelry like a legacy or a curse.

“What would you like to see?” Tomasso asks.

When I don’t answer, Freddy offers, “Rings?”

He smiles at me for confirmation. I nod. Swallow.

“Perhaps some earrings, too?” I say.

It sounds like I’m being a bad sport, not wanting to join in on the fun.Rings!Most women would be ecstatic.

We look at a series of stones and settings. Four carats, five, six, and, finally, seven. They’re all too big. Freddy wants something likethat, but I don’t. I don’tneed it.I’m surprised to find that instead I need him to finish the conversation he started with me about Lorna in the shallows that day. Whatever it is, that’s the bright, sharp thing that would make me happy right now.

Predictably, none of the earrings suit me.

“Do you have anything antique?” I ask, and Freddy seems to light up, like in saying this, I have revealed some deep, authentic aspect of my personality he has never had access to.

Antique!

“Sì,”Tomasso says,“momento.”

He steps into the back room.

“What do you think?” Freddy asks, pushing a loose diamond with his index finger.

I want to say that it’s impossible to think about marriage right now. That I’m horrified he can. Maybe beneath Freddy’s implacable optimism is something closer to my father and uncle’s desire to pull things in closer. Is that the familiar thing that attracted me to him in the first place? Could Ifeelit?

“I think I want something more sophisticated,” I say, hoping he can read between the lines.Smaller. Distinctive. Further off.

Tomasso looks at me and holds up the ring he’s brought from the back,antique.

“Sì?”

It’s beautiful, but I change the subject. I pull the necklace from my bag.

“I wonder if you might help me,” I say to Tomasso. “This is a family piece, but I don’t know much about it.”

He sets down the engagement ring with the rest of the diamonds and takes the necklace from my hands gently, reverently even.

“Ah,” he says, turning it in the light.

When he does this, I can see how the necklace—a solid gold collar made up of writhing snakes—has delicately etched scales within the larger ones. And when he twists it, it looks like the whole thing is moving, slithering. He sets it on the counter and fumbles in the drawer behind him, pulling out a cloth and a small dropper bottle. Heshakes the bottle, and applies one drop to the underside of the necklace. Immediately on contact, the solution begins to fizz. Before I can reach for the necklace, save it from dissolution, he wipes the liquid off with the cloth and buffs the piece.

“I think,” he says, “it is very nice. Not gold. Butben fatto,yes?”

A fake.

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