Page 48

She’s like a fish with a snorkel, and has decided that I must see every underwater somersault. They all look the same and all need applause, and I am happy to provide it.

Two years ago, she couldn’t hold her breath past the pool steps without getting tired. Now she never wants to leave the water.

Veda sits at the pool’s edge with her feet in the water and a stopwatch she uses to time breath-holds Sarah insists are records. She’s a dream in a red swimsuit and a white wide-brimmed hat and crazy big sunglasses that she makes work somehow.

“Seventeen seconds,” Veda reports, clicking the stopwatch. “New personal best.”

“It was a hundred,” Sarah counters, surfacing.

“It was seventeen on the clock, and seventeen is excellent.”

“A hundred is more excellent.”

“You can’t argue with the stopwatch, piccolina,” I say. “The stopwatch is science.”

“Noooo,” she says, whipping her wet strands side to side. She likes doing that, now that there’s some length there. “The stopwatch is a liar!” Then she submerges to shatter her own best time again.

Veda laughs, tipping her face to the sun, and for a while, the war is a rumor happening to someone else.

Then Beppe’s voice comes low through my earpiece. “Perched over the south fence. One man, camera, up in the tree line. He’s been photographing the pool for two minutes.”

The afternoon changes temperature without changing its face. I keep clapping for a somersault I didn’t see.

“Give him another three before you move on him. Could be a lost tourist⁠—”

“He’s moving closer in, about to cross the fence.”

Sealed his own fate. “Alive,” I murmur. “Bring him to the equipment shed. Quietly. No noise near the water.”

“Understood.”

I remove the towel from the chair and drape it over my arm, just a father retrieving it for his wet child. I leisurely make my way to the shallow end, moving as if I have all afternoon. My walk reveals nothing to the tree line. The camera hidden among the trees will capture its final shots of a peaceful domestic moment. Let Allegra’s man record the calm before the storm.

Veda catches it. Her eyes meet mine over Sarah’s wet head, a question with no words on it.

“Keep her in the water,” I say, low, easy, a man discussing sunscreen. “Ten more minutes. Time her records. Don’t let her out until I come back.”

“Lupo—”

“Veda. Please.”

The please does what the order wouldn’t. She nods once and turns her whole self back to Sarah with a brightness that isn’t real and calls out that the next somersault needs more spin in it, and I go.

The equipment shed smells of chlorine and cut grass. They have him on a stool when I arrive, wrists zip-tied, a good camera in a bag on the workbench beside a long lens that was pointed at my daughter.

He’s young. Sweating.

“Who sent you?”

“No one had to send me. I wanted a shot of the new Sartorre bride to sell. It’d be my break into the industry.”

“What industry is that?”

“Paparazzo. What else?”

He’s got balls. I’ll give him that.

I pick up the camera bag, thumb through the preview screen, and find forty photographs of my child in a swimsuit, and the thing in me that keeps the house warm goes out like a pinched wick.