One more time, I considered the question.

Because I liked going to the library. Because I liked being a scholar on a mission. Noble enough reasons, but in fact there was the practical one: how to get it past the commandant at the door, the inevitable body search, the scanner. Still, I was not ready to give up the idea. I’d gotten away with a lot more and done a lot worse, me and my buddies adept at getting in and out of a house with several pawnable items, and I’d only been caught once.

But I was thirty-seven now, not fifteen, a solid citizen with a master’s degree and a full-time job at a prestigious university. Could I really do anything like that now? More importantly, could I get away with it?

31

I was early, nursing an espresso, had circled the cloister of San Lorenzo twice when the young monk came out to greet me. “Signore Perrone, come va?”

As always, Brother Francesco was smiling.

“Bene, e lei?” I said.

He lifted his hands toward the sky. “Bello giornata. Niente da dire.”

“Sì, bellissimo,” I said. “A very beautiful day.” I had been too impatient to notice before.

“You are an artist?” he asked.

I couldn’t remember ever telling him and gave him a half-hearted nod, though I didn’t feel like one these days.

“You have seen the Annunciation by Fra Filippo Lippi in the north chapel?” He gestured toward the church on the other side of the cloister wall. I had never even gone in, always so intent on getting to the library. The opposite of the typical tourist who had to see everything, I had seen practically nothing. “It is very beautiful,” he said, “but maybe I say this because it was painted by a monk.”

“Monks make great painters,” I said, “like Fra Angelico.”

He asked if I had been to San Marco, and I shook my head, yet another place I had yet to see.

“One of the gems of Florence,” he said.

I asked him how long he’d been part of the order, and he said for ten years, since he’d been eighteen.

“And you’re happy?” I asked.

“I have never regretted it.”

I said that we should all feel that way about our lives, and he asked me if I did not feel that way about mine. I wasn’t sure how to answer him, wasn’t sure how I felt about my life, which felt distant and precarious. I thought about where I’d come from, the things I’d overcome. I said, “I’ve changed my life a lot.”

He looked at me with his big blue eyes, waiting.

“Let’s just say I had my vices. I wasn’t exactly a good kid. Capisce?”

“There are many examples of sinners who become saints.”

“I didn’t say I was that bad, but I don’t think I qualify for sainthood either.” I felt like I was at confession, but there was a kindness about the monk that made me want to open up. “When I was a teenager, I was part of a group, a gang—and we did some bad things. We stole and…”