From between the two large cypress trees that flanked the window, she could see the neatly lined trellises of the Chianti vineyards, faded in the distance by a morning mist. Sembra una cartolina, she thought. Just like a postcard. She had thought the same thing when she arrived in Tuscany almost six years earlier, only then her thoughts had been in English. In spite of her hardships, the country had not lost its beauty to her. She was grateful for this. It was one of the joys life had not stolen from her.

As difficult as the previous night had been, she was ready to start again. She had learned to live this way, discarding the past each night and starting each day anew—picking joy where she could find it—like hunting for mushrooms in the Chianti forests. Sometimes her own endurance astonished her.

The fifteenth-century villa where she lived was twostoried and horseshoe shaped, enclosed with a front wall, forming a sizable courtyard. Her family’s apartment was the largest in the villa and took the entire east wing. While she was a new bride still living in America, her groom, Maurizio, had told her that their apartment in Italy was part of the new section of the restored villa. It was only after she arrived in Italy, three years later, that she realized that “new” is relative in an old country: the “new wing” was only two hundred and seventy years old.

The villa’s center apartment was smaller than Eliana’s by half and was occupied by her sister-in-law Anna, who had lived in the villa since her husband left her five years previous.

The western wing of the villa was used for storage and there was also a small apartment there that was rented out. An arched, wrought iron gate in the center of that wing led to the villa’s garden.

The other buildings on the property were nearly a quarter mile away, surrounded by vineyards: a small, stucco home where Luca, the winery manager, and his wife lived, next to the three-story ochre cantina where the grapes were processed into wine, aged, bottled and shipped.

Eliana’s painting studio was rectangular in shape, with white stucco walls that slanted slightly in toward the center of the house. It had a high, vaulted ceiling supported by heavy, wooden trusses that had been hewn by an ax. The room was on the second floor at the end of the hallway and the only room in the villa where one could see both the inner courtyard and the world outside the villa, depending on which side of the room one stood in. The space was larger than Eliana needed and she had only moved into one half of the room, piling the other half with blank canvases and unframed paintings.

Eliana had wondered if the room was haunted. The first few weeks after she had moved in, she came in each morning to find six of the seven paintings she had hung on the walls tipped to their sides. Each day she checked the paintings’ hooks and wires then righted them, only to find them all tilted again the next morning. All of the pictures except for one.