“We were attacked,” said Imperia, caressing the hair of a crying young woman huddled in her arms. “And it wasn’t just part of the rioting. They were intent on hurting us. Someone doesn’t like what we do.”

I scanned each face but didn’t see her. “Where is she?”

They all exchanged looks. No one answered.

Why won’t they answer? Is she dead? “Where’s Margherita?”

“We couldn’t stop her, Raphael,” said Imperia. “She insisted on going.”

“Where?”

“To protect her father.”

By the time I stumbled back outside, rain had started to fall. The city now stank of smoldering smoke and wet coals. When I found her father’s narrow street, it was eerily empty. Wagons were splintered. Broken doors swung off hinges. Was that motionless mound a dead cow or a dead man? I didn’t look closely enough to find out.

The bakery was smoking. Black soot charred the facade. The door was split in two; someone must’ve axed through it. I waded through splinters, toppled tables, broken bread. “’Gita! ’Gita!” I called, not caring whether rioters or the entire French army heard me. A wild boar snorted past; I jumped out of the way. “’Gita!”

I found her in the back room, among her father’s pans. She was sitting up, breathing, alive—thank Mary—but . . .

Her father’s head was in her lap, hair slick with blood, skin too white, eyes open but blank. She rocked back and forth, as he sprawled across her lap like Jesus in a Pietà. Margherita’s sobs strangled her. “Help him, save him, make him, make him . . .”

Make him as he should be.

I dropped to my knees in front of her.

More times than I care to count, I’ve wished that I could paint over all the ugliness and turn it into flowers and perfumes and pretty. I’ve wished it so often. But I’ve never wanted to paint over the world more than I did in that moment. And I’ve never felt more incapable of doing so. “This place,” she moaned. “After my mother . . . he wanted a better life for me, but he never should’ve brought me here. Never. Rome kills everything good. Everyone good.”

You’d think after all these years of confessing my own losses, I’d know how to comfort someone at such a moment, but what is there to say? Nothing can make it better.

“I can’t stay here,” she choked. “I have to leave.” She dropped her father to the floor and scrambled toward the door like that frantic, flapping chicken I’d seen earlier that night. I went after her, grabbing her, holding her as she flailed, fought against me, pushing, punching. “Let me go, I have to go, I have to get out of here, out of Rome, out of . . .”

I held her tight. “You can’t leave.”

“There’s nothing left for me here.”