“Over there,” he said, pointing to a huge villa with a thin, wooden jetty that was flanked on either side by candy-striped poles, and Emily could make out an ivy-covered entrance to the house at the top of a long flight of stone steps. “Wait here one moment, I’ll see if they can provide us with something to eat.” He dipped his head, took hold of her hand, and placed a gentle kiss on her skin, watched her a moment more, then disappeared up the steps and into the house.

Emily followed a neat gravel path around the side of the house to discover an immaculate garden with a line of palm trees that flanked a swimming pool, the surface of which was perfectly still. There was no one else about and so she decided to slip off her shoes, dangle her legs over the side of the pool and stir her toes through the water, sending ripples over the surface all the way to the other end.

“Why did you ever leave?” she murmured, looking beyond the villa with its stuccoed walls and to the houses that reached all the way up the hillside.

A high whistle, and she looked back to see Noah come outside, beckoning her toward where he was waiting on a covered terrace with curtains drawn back to reveal a panoramic view of the lake.

The terrace floor was pink-and-white checkered marble, the light fittings were the same color as candy floss, and the chair Noah pulled back for her to sit upon had a satin bow tied around its back. But it was what lay beyond the terrace, back toward the jetty and a little to the right, which stopped her from sitting. Something that Emily thought she had seen before made her go back down and around the pool before running toward a view she had looked upon, over and over, without knowing where it actually was.

“She was here,” Emily whispered, leaning both hands on the back of a wooden deck chair with deep green cushions. A pair of them, either side of a stone table, positioned under a tree with branches that reached down to wave hello.

“I was working here, at the hotel, when your grandmother came back.” Noah was there beside her with a far-off look on his face. Almost as if he knew which photograph she was thinking about. A photograph that lived on her grandmother’s bedside table, of Emily’s mother as a toddler, peeping out from the top of one of those very chairs, her grandmother standing behind with both arms either side for protection, both of them smiling at whoever was taking their picture. “The house used to belong to Mussolini, before it became a hotel.”

He was talking for the sake of having something to say. She was used to people behaving this way around her, filling in the gaps created by her silence, but this was different. It wasn’t because she didn’t want to speak, to talk to him about her mother, about why she was here and all the thousands of other questions she wanted answers to. But rather she had no idea what to say, or how to convey all of what it was she was feeling.