Will had inspected his talisman as though it were a jewel, turning it in the light, looking at it in an array of moods: over a port, late at night; in the demonic glare of his dark room; in the freezing January wind, right after his mother’s funeral; in the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento; and again in his tiny allotted space in the reading room at the Vatican, where he’d spent days searching the archives for the murky history of the Campo de’ Fiori. Such an emblematic object, a key. What lock did it turn? The lock it had fitted seemed to have vanished with time, lost in a spiral of years. He didn’t even know, he realized, who had first left it. He knew nothing really about his mother’s family; his normally mild-tempered father refused flatly to talk about the subject.

I am what I am, and what I am is what you will see.

His mind rehearsed these closing words over again while he covered the last miles along the B road to Chartres. He knew the whole sheet by heart, and easily managed the impressive feat of focusing on the necessary road skills while contemplating the text on the aged parchment, which he had photocopied and carried with him inside his leather jacket all the summer long. Even in the heat in Sicily he’d clutched the jacket to him, rather than be parted from the precious legacy, and the small key found a home on a chain around his neck where, he’d decided, it would remain until death, if necessary. He had tried explaining his need to understand so much more about his inheritance to others, but he knew that even Alex felt it was becoming a worrying obsession. His elder brother, of course, would have approached the whole enigma very differently, fitting any conjectures into the spaces between his work, his research paper, and his close relationship with his young son. Nor could Alex have disappeared to Europe for the summer because of his other commitments. But Will was a different man, consumed with a desire to know what it all meant, and unable to give his full attention to anything else until he’d solved this riddle of the sphinx and found the lock that was home to the mysterious key. His own sense of identity seemed caught up in the puzzle, and it was not the rumors of the key securing “the most precious treasure of our family” that were the lifeblood of his quest. He wasn’t interested in gold or jewels, but wondered what had been so important to his family’s sense of secrecy, for them to guard this object—forever and an age, it must have been.