“Cosa è successo?” I asked.

“Una tragedia!” she said, lifting her head, tears tracking mascara down her cheeks before she fell back against my chest.

Beside us, an elderly monk with a face out of an old Rembrandt portrait wailed, “È morto!”

“What? Who?”

“Fra Francesco,” he said.

Had I heard him correctly? “Che cosa?”

The monk looked up at the dark sky and said it again. “Fra Francesco—È morto—È morto!”

No way. Brother Francesco. Dead? Impossible.

Another monk joined him, the two of them crying in unison, crossing themselves over and over and repeating, “Fra Francesco.”

Chiara looked up at me with swollen eyes. “Nel sonno è suffocate,” she said.

I couldn’t believe it; the idea of such a young man suffocating in his sleep didn’t seem possible. I asked about the door and the police tape. She shook her head. “An old door, è rotto, broken.”

I patted her back, then looked past her to see the Italian equivalent of EMTs coming through the dark alleyway, a body covered with a sheet strapped to a gurney.

“I must pray,” Chiara said.

I nodded, the idea of prayer something I had always loathed, but right now, it seemed like the absolutely right thing to do.

The alleyway to the cloister was closed, but the cathedral was open.

The interior was a surprise, expansive and impressive behind that plain, rough-hewn facade. Everything gray, white, and massive, the diamond-patterned floor leading me down a long, wide nave lined with tall columns that drew my eyes up to an ornate ceiling, hundreds of white squares lined with gold, each with a gilded floret in the center, a few with the Medici gold shield and small red balls. Nothing like any church I’d ever known, certainly not St. Mary Star of the Sea, the redbrick church my parents had dragged me to, always against my will—until I was twelve and refused to ever go again.

At the end of the nave was a sign for the Old Sacristy and a plaque that said it had been designed by Brunelleschi. It was a smallish room with a dome that looked like a large opened umbrella perfectly divided into twelve segments, and below it, on the back wall, a simple crucifix. The seating was cordoned off, and I knelt on instinct and made the sign of the cross, then headed back into the main church, which was practically empty. I found a seat in a pew and watched an old woman light a candle in the apse. Then I closed my eyes, and the young monk’s words came back to me.

Continua così. Avanti così.

Stay on course.

I had wanted to ask him if what I had been doing here in Florence was the right course, but it was too late now.

Though I doubted that Brother Francesco needed my help, I recited a prayer, one I was surprised I remembered.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord,

and let perpetual light shine upon him.