The Nardini lake house sits at the end of a gravel road that stops pretending to be a road, and the first thing you learn about it is that every window is lit and none of the doors are locked for you. It is the middle of June, ten at night, and the lake is doing that flat black thing under the terrace. A boat is tied at the dock with about three times more rope than it needs.

Your mother is upstairs with the man she married. You have been handed a duffel bag and a key that does not fit the room they pointed you at.

Four men are on the dock. One of them is smoking.

The one with the cigarette does not get up. Nicolò Nardini is the oldest; you can tell by the way the other three arranged themselves around him without being told, the way furniture arranges itself around a lamp. He looks at you the way a man looks at a manifest.

The blond one in glasses on the crate does not look at you; he is reading something on his phone. The third, in a black shirt with his arms crossed, watches the water. The youngest has a book open on his knees and has not turned a page since you came down the steps.

Nicolò takes a folded card out of his jacket and holds it out low over the water, close enough that you will have to step onto the dock to take it.

He lets you see the whole dock behind him, four pairs of eyes, nothing moving.