Chapter 10 - The Song in the Sunlight
Christmas Eve in the Moretti penthouse was twenty-four degrees and perfectly, miraculously clear.
The lake was a sheet of deep sapphire, bordered by a rim of white ice along the seawalls, reflecting a winter sun that turned the glass towers of the Loop into pillars of burnished gold and bronze.
The grand ballroom on the fiftieth floor was no longer an empty gallery.
In the corner by the piano—an antique Steinway that had sat beneath a canvas shroud since Isabella’s death—stood a fourteen-foot balsam fir brought down from the mountains of Idaho by private transport three days earlier.
It was not decorated with silver balls or professional glass from Marshall Field's.
It was covered in lopsided paper stars cut from old construction blueprints, strings of dried popcorn that Mia had threaded with a blunt tapestry needle, and eighty-five small river stones wrapped in foil and hung from the lower branches like ancient, mysterious fruit.
At the long walnut dining table sat twelve people:
Arthur, wearing a gray tweed suit that had belonged to his father, pouring vintage Barolo into crystal glasses; Marco Varga, who was currently engaged in a solemn, high-stakes game of thumb wrestling with Bella on the edge of the linen tablecloth; and Frank Calder, the old security captain, who was teaching Mia how to carve an apple into the shape of a swan with a butter knife.
At the head of the table sat Sarah’s brother, Toby.
His face was weathered, his skin brown from two months in the mountain sun, his hands thick and calloused from splitting cedar logs along the Salmon River. He was clean-shaven, his eyes clear, wearing a dark green wool shirt that Dante had bought him from a outfitter in Boise.
He looked across the table at his sister with an expression of quiet, disbelieving wonder, as if he were afraid that if he drew a full breath, the room would dissolve back into the damp basement on Archer Avenue.
Dante stood by the bay window, holding a glass of sparkling water with a twist of lemon.
He had not checked his phone in four hours. The Kimber was not under his arm; it was locked in the floor safe beneath his study desk, its magazine cleared, its chamber empty for the first time in ten years.
Sarah walked over to him, carrying two small plates of sweet fried dough dusted with powdered sugar—the sfinci that the women in Piana degli Albanesi made for the feast of the Nativity.
She was wearing a dark emerald velvet dress that fitted her shoulders perfectly, her hair pinned up with small, antique silver combs that had belonged to Dante’s grandmother. She looked like a woman who had never known the smell of commercial pine wash or the terror of an eviction notice on a cracked linoleum floor.
"They ate four each," she said, nodding toward the twins. "Arthur is horrified. He thinks their sugar levels will cause a diplomatic incident."
Dante looked down at her.
The low winter sun caught the green in her eyes, turning them into the color of the shallow water off the cliffs of Mondello.
"Let them eat," Dante said softly. "The house can take the noise."
He set his glass down on the marble sill, reached into his breast pocket, and pulled out a small, flat box of crushed black velvet.
Sarah froze. The plate of sfinci trembled slightly in her hand.
"Dante," she whispered, her voice dropping into a register of sudden, breathless caution. "The contract... we said—"
"The contract was burned six weeks ago, Sarah," Dante interrupted.
He opened the box.
May you like
Inside, resting on a bed of faded white silk, was not a diamond from the jewelers on Michigan Avenue.
It was an antique silver ring, worn thin along the band by seventy years of work, set with an uncut, milky emerald that had been mined from the hills above Palermo in the middle of the nineteenth century.
