For days, we did not leave the villa, and each day I was a little less afraid. I felt safe when I was inside the boundaries of the garden wall because I was certain whoever it was who wished us harm was outside. As long as we stayed there, protecting the villa and protected by it, we would be okay.

Joe was happiest when Francesco was with him and they were together, working on the car. The Sicilian schools had broken up for the summer now, so Francesco was freer. Vito had some contract work in the city of Gela, more than an hour’s drive from Porta Sarina, so for the time being we didn’t have to worry about him either. Affection and respect were growing between Francesco and Joe and I was never quite sure if Francesco was an excuse for Joe to work on the car, or if the car was a reason for him to spend time with Francesco. The old tyres were off now and the body of the car was supported on bricks. Beneath the bonnet, Joe assured me, good progress was being made.

One afternoon, when I was upstairs cleaning, I came across Anna’s old diary. I hadn’t looked at it in a while and, this time, I realised it covered not just one year, but several: the years she never talked about – her last years in Sicily when she was aged between fifteen and eighteen. Apart from the diary, all that remained to speak of Anna’s existence in those years were the few photographs I’d found and the portrait painted in the Giardini Iblei.

I took the diary downstairs, sat at the kitchen table and flicked through it. Some of the entries were no more than a few words: many referred to Anna’s boarding school in Rome. She enjoyed listing the ‘disgusting’ meals the pupils were forced to eat, clearly regarding them as a form of abuse. Some entries were in Italian, the lyrics of songs Anna had painstakingly transcribed from the radio and then written into the diary – she had told me she used to do this when she was a girl. I remembered her saying: ‘We’d spend hours beside the radio waiting for our favourite songs.’

We, she had said. We. Anna and who else? Matilde Romano?

Soon enough, I found some lyrics written by a different hand. The other writing was smaller, neater and more playful. The dots over the ‘i’s were little hearts, full stops had become smiley faces, rabbits and cats had been doodled amongst the lyrics. The doodles illustrating the transcription of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ were little horned men with tails, holding pitchforks. They’d been drawn in a similar way to the two characters on Anna’s bedroom wall, which meant, I assumed, that this was the work of the young Matilde Romano, although I had no sense of Matilde in the drawings at all.

48