“He’ll never take me back now, not the way I’ve disgraced the family.” I gave a chop of my hand, cutting off that line of action like a cleaver. My family in Venice—my father, my mother, my younger sister—they might as well be dead to me now, because I was certainly dead to them. “You see, there’s this.”

I reached under my apron and tossed the folded packet of pages across the table at Marco.

He knew that packet almost as well as I did. “Where did you—” He lunged for it, thumbing rapidly through the pages, pausing at the stain at the corner of page 112 where a thumbprint of egg white and nutmeg showed in a familiar yellow smear. “Your father’s original recipes?”

“Every last one he’s ever collected over forty years of cooking.”

Marco’s face had lit up, but now it fell again. “But they’re in code—they always were, he never taught anyone the code—”

“I know it. I can teach you. Then you’ll have all his recipes.” Except for the one ingredient or two that my father always left out of the written recipe and left to memory, just in case someone stole his code. May God forgive me for saying my father was a suspicious bastard, but most cooks are. Of course, I knew all the omitted ingredients, too.

Marco’s dark eyes lifted, regarding me keenly across the table. “How did you get your hands on this? He’s always kept them closer than a church keeps its relics.”

I couldn’t help but wince at the word relic. Yes, good thing I hadn’t brought up the mummified hand. No need for my skittish cousin to find out he was sheltering a thief of far worse things than recipes. “He sometimes takes his recipes to show prospective customers,” I said instead. “It impresses them—the codes, the secrecy. He’d angle visitors anywhere he could find them; get them talking about the wedding feast they were planning for their niece or the farewell cena they were hosting when their son left for university. Then he’d whip out his recipes and show how he could do it better than whoever they’d hired. He got quite a number of new patrons that way.” My father would be angling for clients at my funeral Mass, of that I had no doubt. “The last time he visited me, I—well, I waited till his back was turned, just before he left, and snatched them out of his pack.” I’d already had the half-formed plan of fleeing. Once I had that packet of recipes in my hand, the plan had crystallized from yearning into action. That was when the fear had started, too—what my father would do to me if I was caught, what the laws of Venice would do to me—but it hadn’t been enough to stop me.