Come Down Here

Clara waited until after breakfast to take the camera back.

Mia objected throughout the walk from the cottage.

"He said I could hold it."

"You did hold it. All yesterday."

"Today is different holding."

Clara stopped beside a flower bed and crouched to straighten the strap.

"It belonged to someone he loved. We need to make sure he really wants us to have it."

Mia considered this.

"Like your yellow cup?"

Rebecca's chipped yellow mug occupied the safest shelf in their tiny kitchen.

"Yes. Like my yellow cup."

Mia hugged the camera more carefully.

They found Lorenzo on the terrace, reading something on his phone beside a cup of black coffee. His jacket lay across an empty chair. Without his guards immediately beside him, he looked almost like an ordinary man having a disappointing morning.

Then he looked up, and Clara remembered why the gardener had decided to work at the other end of the lawn.

"Is something wrong?"

"No. I wanted to return this properly."

Mia stood half behind Clara's leg.

"Mommy says it's your yellow cup."

Lorenzo put down his phone.

Clara closed her eyes briefly.

"My mother left me a mug. I was explaining that some belongings matter more than they look as though they should."

He studied the camera.

"Your mother's dead?"

"Nine years ago."

"I'm sorry."

There was no practiced courtesy in his voice. Clara found herself looking at him instead of at the table.

"Thank you."

He moved his coffee away from the edge.

"Set it here."

Mia placed the camera on the table with both hands. She didn't let go immediately.

Lorenzo noticed.

"Would you like to take a picture before I put it away?"

She brightened.

"Of you?"

"Of the garden."

"I already did the garden."

Clara touched the winding lever. "There's no film in it, sweetheart. The pictures haven't been saved."

Mia stared at her.

"None of them?"

"I'm afraid not."

Her eyes filled with such immediate betrayal that Clara felt worse than when she'd explained why they couldn't keep a worm in the refrigerator.

"But I did Rosa's bread."

"We can take another picture with my phone."

"It got eaten."

Lorenzo's mouth moved slightly.

Clara looked at him. He returned to complete seriousness.

"There will be more bread," he said.

"It was a very good one."

"I'll speak to Rosa."

Mia rubbed her eyes with her fists, accepted this as a reasonable intervention, and pointed at him.

"Now you."

"Mia, Mr. Duca is busy."

"He's sitting."

Lorenzo leaned back.

"Apparently those are mutually exclusive."

Clara almost smiled. "In her experience, yes."

He stood, and Mia immediately tipped her head back.

"You're too tall. Come down here."

"You could stand farther away," Clara suggested.

But Lorenzo was already bending one knee.

Mia lifted the camera. He looked straight at it with the expression he wore when deliveries arrived late.

"That's not smiling."

"It's the face I have."

"You have another one. The door man did."

"The door man has fewer responsibilities."

Clara pressed her lips together.

Mia lowered the camera.

"Are you sad about your mommy?"

Clara's amusement vanished.

"Sweetheart, that's a private question."

Lorenzo's gaze shifted to her. She couldn't tell whether he was angry.

"She heard us talking," Clara explained. "I didn't mean for her to ask you."

"Does your mother still miss hers?" he asked Mia.

"Sometimes. She holds the cup."

Clara looked down.

Lorenzo was quiet long enough for the birds in the hedge to become noticeable.

"Yes," he said finally. "Sometimes I'm sad about my mother."

Mia set the camera on the flagstones.

"You need a hug."

"I don't think—"

She put her arms around his neck.

Clara reached forward, then stopped herself. Mia wasn't frightened. Lorenzo had gone perfectly still, one broad hand resting against his knee, the other hovering awkwardly beside her blue skirt.

"We ask first," Clara said gently.

Mia loosened her hold.

"Can I?"

He swallowed.

"You're already here."

She took that as permission and leaned against him again.

His hand settled between her shoulder blades.

It was an ordinary gesture. Clara had done it thousands of times. Yet watching him discover where to put his hand made her throat tighten.

Mia drew back, satisfied with her work.

"Now we can do the picture."

Clara took out her phone.

"I'll take one of both of you."

"Wait. I need mine."

Mia picked up the old camera. Its leather case caught against the table leg, and something thin fluttered onto the terrace.

Clara caught it before the breeze could carry it away.

A small print, creased at one corner. The inner lining of the camera case had peeled loose, exposing a narrow space behind it.

"I didn't break it," Mia said quickly.

"You didn't. The stitching was already coming away."

Clara turned the photograph over.

Two women stood beside a low stone wall. One was Eleanor Duca, younger than in the hallway portrait, her dark hair blowing across her mouth.

The other woman held a baby.

Clara knew her before she understood how impossible the picture was.

Her mother's uneven smile. Her mother's hand curved around the baby's head. A green dress Clara remembered seeing folded in the bottom of a drawer.

"Mommy?" Mia tugged her sleeve. "That's your baby picture. The one in our book."

There was the same knitted yellow bonnet. The same tiny fist pressed beneath a chin.

Clara had a cropped version at home. She had never known who stood outside its edges.

"Clara?" Lorenzo asked.

She realized she had stopped breathing.

He rose slowly beside her.

"Do you know that woman?"

Clara touched the photograph without meaning to.

"That's my mother."

His eyes moved from the picture to her face.

"Rebecca?"

Hearing her mother's name in his voice made the terrace tilt beneath her.

"You knew her?"

"I remember her. She worked here when I was young."

Clara turned the print over. On the back, in faded blue ink, someone had written three words.

Protect her always.

Beneath them was a date from twenty-eight years earlier.

Clara looked again at the infant in her mother's arms.

"That's me," she said. "Why did your mother have a picture of me?"