Chapter 2
The blanket was a mistake, and Lorenzo knew it was a mistake before he finished making it.
Rosa had found an old wool square in the linen room and folded it beside the bed, far enough from the fireplace to be safe and close enough to the warmth that any sensible creature would have preferred it to marble. Lorenzo set the puppy down on it, pointed once, and said, “Stay.”
The puppy looked at him.
Lorenzo went to the bathroom, washed his hands, changed into a dark shirt, and came back to find the blanket empty and the puppy curled on top of his left shoe.
He moved it. Two minutes later it came back. He moved it again. On the third attempt the animal did not even pretend to consider the blanket. It walked around the wool with the unhurried contempt of a man declining a bad contract, climbed onto the polished leather, and lowered its head with a sigh.
Lorenzo stood over it in silence.
Men who refused him once usually reconsidered before being asked a second time. This creature had refused him three times before dinner and was now asleep as though negotiations had concluded. He should have been irritated. Instead he found himself turning the lamp so the light would not fall across the animal’s face.
He lay awake a long time. The house had a sound he knew better than his own breathing — pipes contracting behind the walls, the elevator settling between floors, the low shift of boots as the guards changed posts on the hour. Now there was something else in the room, small and uneven, a breath that caught every few seconds as though the animal had not yet learned that nobody was going to take the warmth away.
He told himself he was listening because a puppy that thin might stop breathing in the night.
Somewhere after midnight he stopped believing that.
At five he was awake, and by ten past he had done something he had not done in fifteen years, which was walk into the servant kitchen in his shirt sleeves. Rosa nearly dropped a bowl.
She had worked in the house long enough to understand that the master knew the kitchen existed roughly the way kings know stables exist. He did not visit it.
“Chicken,” Lorenzo said. “Boiled. No salt. Small pieces.” Rosa stared at him. “And water. Not cold.”
Her expression changed by less than a fraction. “For the guest?”
He looked at her.
Rosa lowered her eyes at once, though the corners of her mouth had already given her away. “Yes,” Lorenzo said. “For the guest.”
Mia arrived twenty minutes later in her nightclothes, dragging Elena behind her by one hand, and stopped so suddenly that her mother nearly walked into her. The puppy was eating from a shallow ceramic dish near Lorenzo’s feet.
“He stayed,” Mia said.
“Apparently.”
She dropped to her knees. The puppy lifted its head, tail tapping once against the tile. “See. He knows me. He knows chicken.”
Lorenzo considered this. “He knows chicken.”
Mia decided that was not worth arguing about. Elena remained in the doorway with her hands folded, and Lorenzo noticed how closely she watched the dog, and the bowl, and him, in that order.
“The veterinarian will be here at eight,” he said.
“Thank you, Señor.”
Mia looked up. “Does he have a name now?”
“No.”
“You have to name him.”
“Why?”
She frowned at him as though he had asked why rain fell downward. “Because he lives here.”
Lorenzo almost corrected her. One night was not living somewhere. One night was an arrangement, a delay, a temporary exception, the kind of thing a man says to a child so that both of them can get through the afternoon.
Then the puppy finished eating, walked past the blanket Rosa had laid near the stove, crossed the kitchen, and sat down on Lorenzo’s shoe.
Mia smiled. Elena turned her head away, and Lorenzo was almost certain he saw her press her lips together.
He said nothing.
He did, however, that same afternoon, ask Matteo Richi how a dog had gotten through the delivery gate.
Matteo had run estate security for fifteen years. He was fifty-three, built like a man who had spent his youth carrying other men out of buildings, and he answered without a flicker of hesitation.
“No one entered through the delivery gate, Señor.”
“I didn’t ask if anyone entered. I asked how a dog got in.”
“Then a dog got in. There’s a drainage channel under the eastern wall. It floods in autumn and the grate rusts through. I’ll have it replaced.”
Lorenzo looked at him for a moment. “Show me the footage.”
Matteo’s face did not change. He nodded once and left, and came back forty minutes later with a tablet and the flat, patient expression of a man delivering an inconvenience.
“The channel camera, Señor.”
The screen showed the eastern wall at dawn: wet stone, ivy, the drainage grate, empty road beyond. Clean. Ordinary. Nothing moved in it for nine minutes.
“Run it back to four in the morning.”
Matteo did. The image held.
Lorenzo watched it twice. There was a bird in the upper right corner of the frame, crossing from the wall to the hedge, and something about it bothered him in a way he could not yet name.
“Good,” he said.
Matteo took the tablet back. “I’ll have the grate sealed tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow is fine.”
When the door closed, Lorenzo sat for a long time with his hand flat on the desk, and then he walked down to the security room himself, alone, which he had not done in years, and asked the technician to pull up the camera over the delivery gate. The one set into the wall, at the eastern edge, where a three-year-old said she had found a puppy under the bushes.
The technician pulled it up.
The camera was pointed at the blank stone wall. It had been turned several degrees off the road, so that its black glass eye recorded nothing but ivy, and behind it, on the far side of the estate, the eastern drainage grate sat undisturbed, unrusted, and sealed in place since the spring.
Lorenzo looked at the screen for a long moment.
May you like
A stray had not wandered into his house.
Somebody had carried it in.
