the person who had loved me despite everything. I blinked away tears, fighting the scream that rose in my throat. “No,” I sobbed. It was the only word that came. “No. No. No.”
“You know this man?” Sal asked, a morbid curiosity in his eyes.
“He’s my husband,” I said. I couldn’t say his name. Not to Sal.
“Oh, madame,” Greta said, her voice filled with alarm. “Come with me. Sal will carry him to the mews.” She came to my side and helped me stand. I must have collapsed again, because I remember holding on to Luca, holding tight, as if he might come back to life if only I held on hard enough.
When at last Greta helped me up, Sal said, “The dogs found him. Lord knows how long he’s been out here. From the look of it, I’d say weeks, even a month. I’m guessing they tried to hike here from one of the ski towns.”
“They?” I asked, looking past Luca at the snowy wilderness beyond the gate.
Sal led me past Luca, to a body lying beyond the gate. It was Bob, Luca’s father.
The sky was dark, the clouds shrouding the courtyard in a mist so thick that the chapel doors seemed, as I approached, to materialize from a cloud. Inside, the haze cleared, burned away by candles lit throughout the nave. The warm, flickering light made the stained glass scintillate and the rows of wooden benches glow, even as Luca and Bob’s bodies—laid out on blankets near the altar—remained covered in shadow.
In the spring, when the roads cleared, Sal would transport my husband and his father down the mountain, and they would be shipped back to Milton for burial. But for the rest of the winter, they would lie frozen in the chapel. I would visit them every afternoon, sitting in the freezing cold, grappling with all I had lost.
On my first visit, I sat on a bench and looked at Luca. There he was, the man I had loved, the lips I had kissed, the hands that I had held. For years, he had been the entirety of my family. All hope of starting over had slipped away with his life. I understood then what I had not been able to fully grasp during our separation: my future was so entwined with his that I didn’t know how to go on without him.
I knelt over my husband, looking at him, trying to remember what he had looked like before. It wasn’t his face, that still mask, not his eyes frozen open in a horrid gaze. Not his hands stiffened to claws. Everything that had made me love this man had been siphoned away, and yet, it comforted me to be there next to his familiar body. I lowered my head to his chest, half expecting to hear the faint thrum of his heart. A wave of longing overtook me as I pictured him next to me in the enormous bed in Turin, the luxurious sheets wrapped around us, his eyes alight with the possibilities of what lay ahead. It had been many years since I had prayed, but I whispered a prayer then for Luca.
As I turned to leave, I saw a book on the altar. Making my way around the baptismal font, I found a thick Bible covered in dust and spiderwebs, the name “Montebianco” stamped in gold into the leather. The pages were thin and covered in tiny foreign words, but at the back of the Bible, folded into the binding, I discovered a registry of baptisms and marriages and funerals. Glancing down the list, I read names and dates matching those in the mausoleum—all my ancestors who had lived and died before me—but what interested me more than the Montebianco deaths were the dates written in the column under Marriage.
In the past century, there had been only a handful of additions: Eleanor and Ambrose, August 14, 1909; Giovanni and Marta, June 9, 1949; Guillaume and Dolores on September 3, 1971. The mostly empty page seemed too empty, like some great reproach to my grief. I searched my pockets for a pen and, steadying my hand, wrote out our names and the date of our marriage in the family Bible.
Twenty-Four
Luca’s death had opened a wound, one that throbbed with the sharpness of Bernadette’s knife. I took the painkillers Vita had given me and slept for days at a time. When I woke, I’d watch the world from the recesses of a trance. The sun fell softly