I dipped the silver spoon into the steaming dark liquid and filled it with death.
The dusky blue of the soup plate’s painted lilies gleamed through beef and broth, flakes of chopped herbs swirling around the rim of the majolica. I could almost see the enameled figure at the bottom, the maiden always bent of knee, the unicorn’s head heavy on her lap. The empty forest around them as if the world had come to a hush.
I doubted I’d manage to reach the maiden with breath left in my body.
I took the first sip of the weak stew. There was a trace of bitterness, a tail end of it, but the rosemary and the basil had disguised it, faithful friends they always were. Even now, the herbs spoke to me, whispering warnings in their earth-soaked language that I blinked away as the liquid scorched my throat. I knew all too well what I was doing.
“It’s too hot,” Francesco said, his large eyes squinting at the steam.
I forced myself to smile. “Blow on it for a few seconds. Gently,” I added as his cheeks puffed up with air.
I looked down the stone table at my other children, eating in silence, my eyes and mind attempting to fly over the empty seat and falling like shot birds. At the end of the table, Florindo sat staring at the walnut backrest of that same empty chair, conjuring up the same tendrils of golden hair that I could still feel under my fingers. His spoon hovered over the plate.
“Eat, sposo,” I said.
He blinked and the tears fell but he did as he was told. A good husband and father. A good man.
I followed my own instructions and drank more broth, the vital part, my jaw too tight to chew through beef. The only sounds were the tapping of spoons against majolica and the roar of the torrent behind the mill. But under layers upon layers of the noises that had filled my days since it had happened, there was that one sound. That crack. It ricocheted through me still.
A twist of nausea made me bite the inside of my lips. I looked up at one of the etched cornices that encircled the sala, focusing on a gold-leaf curlicue as I breathed and swallowed the bile down. If I became ill now, so soon, none of this would work. They would all stop and they must not.
How I wished we’d never left Genova. That we’d never come to this place.
I did what I could to ignore the bite of sudden hot pain in my stomach and dipped my spoon back in the stew. My hand trembled. Candlelight contracted like a pupil.
Please let this be over quickly.