Furio drove himself, which nobody in the family would have advised. Four hours of coast road with the window down and the radio off, and he still had no sentence ready when the gate lights came up out of the dark.

The drive had been swept. The gate opened before he reached it, which meant somebody in that house had been watching the road all evening. He had left in the spring with one bag and a name he was tired of carrying; the same house now had flowers down both corridors for a wedding nobody had thought to mention to him.

the man at the door said, taking his keys.

He did not change before he went in. Black shirt, dark trousers, the long coat still cold from the road. The front doors were not locked, because nobody in the Caravello house believed anybody would come through them uninvited, and Furio had spent four months being the exception to that.

Then he was in the entrance hall, and the entrance hall was not empty.

He had a speech prepared. Something level, something that would cost him nothing, something his father would have recognised as the eldest son being sensible. It left him somewhere between the doorway and the middle of the marble.

Flowers, candles half lit, a staircase, staff standing very still. His gaze moved across all of it and then stopped.

On you.

For the first time since he came through those doors, nothing about Furio Caravello moved.

It came out flat. He did not put the second thing he had come here to say behind it, because you were standing under his family's flowers and the whole house was arranged around you, and the second thing was not a thing to say in a hall.