First I see one wheel, then another, then two more, then the whole pram. Then, of course, I see the baby. I didn’t tell you before, but I’d spotted it the moment I arrived.

How could you miss it?

I’m not very good at guessing the ages of babies, but seen like that, from not very far away, I would say it was a few months old, less than six, anyway. But to tell you the truth, once the first moment of shock has passed, what surprises me isn’t the child.

What surprises me is that the sexy brunette, the brunette who is kissing my father, isn’t holding her baby.

Do you get it this time? If she isn’t the one carrying the baby?

My Papa is.

50

23 August 2016, 9 a.m.

At dawn, once the party-goers of Oscelluccia beach had gone to bed, once the lights of the Tropi-Kalliste had been turned off, once Maria-Chjara had put on her dressing-gown and the last echoes of the techno music had faded, been drowned, been washed away by the reassuring toing-and-froing of the waves, Clotilde had fallen asleep in the hull of the Aryon. Huddled against a dirty old blanket that lay in a corner of the hull and smelled of a mixture of salt and tar. After hours spent half-asleep, gazing at the stars. Being strafed by the green and purple strobes from the beach bar. Wondering whether her mother had come back to life on an asteroid, and if sometimes she came back down here again. Dreaming of comet-men who left her. Exploring the black holes of her memories, the ones hidden behind the big bang at the Petra Coda precipice. After hours of this, Clotilde had finally drifted off.

The sound of her telephone woke her.

Natale!

The bastard who had dumped her here and gone back to his wife, his tail between his legs. Or his fin, rather. Who had left her abandoned to her dreams, lying on the bottom of the Aryon; she had slept on them, and they smelled of tar and seagull droppings. That bastard who had relinquished his life for the ghost of an architect. She had been willing to poke her nose into his abandoned files, to put her mouth to them, her tongue, everything she had in her heart, in her belly and between her legs, to become an advocate for his aborted destiny. But she was too late, far too late, more than three decades too late.

At least Natale had the decency to phone her to apologise.

‘Clotilde? It’s Natale. My father-in-law wants to see you.’

Funny way to apologise …

‘Sergeant Garcia? Where is he? In his Jacuzzi?’

Clotilde sat up, the water lapping around her. She felt light, free, prepared to loosen the Aryon’s moorings.

‘No, at my house. At Punta Rossa.’

‘So you’ve told him you’re getting rid of his daughter and asking for my hand in marriage?’