He turned around and faced the hill across the street above him. There it was. Costanza had described the house too, and she had shown him photographs of it. Large and square, it rose to four stories and had a hipped roof and a large garden. Like many of the houses in the area its detailing was rendered decoratively in paint. Bright yellow and pale green trompe l’oeil quoins delineated the corners, and painted frames outlined the windows. A band of molding with swags and leaves, also painted, divided the first and second floors. Only the shutters were three-dimensional, made of wood and colored dark green. The decoration made the house feel more like pastry than architecture; its buoyancy seemed at odds with what he knew about the lives that had been lived there.

On the second floor a small terrace projected over the vestibule that contained the front door. This floor and the ground floor below, Henry knew, belonged to Maria Rosaria. Her grandfather had built the house in 1900, and it had been divided up over the generations. A parlor, a bedroom, a dining room, and the kitchen were downstairs. A large marble staircase led up to the bedrooms. One of them opened onto the terrace, where a striped awning provided cover overhead.

A laundry rack stood in one corner. Henry squinted at it. He couldn’t tell if the clothes drying on it were unusually small, or if he was just far away. He rubbed his eyes and decided they were likely an adult’s socks, or underwear.

He looked at the house for the longest time. It seemed so fully inhabited. Costanza had spoken to him about it in so much detail that he could not regard it as a mere building. After staring at it for a few more minutes, he turned back to face the sea.

Half an hour later, above the birdsong, he heard a faint squeaking, followed by a gentle metallic clang. He pivoted around again and looked at the house. No one was at the gate at the bottom of the stairs. Maybe the sound came from another gate at the top of them, a gate Henry could not see but deduced was there.

A twin gate, up at the other end. Installed years back maybe to keep children, Costanza herself once, from tumbling down the steep stone stairs.

He looked so hard at the bottom of the staircase, the three or four steps that were visible from the bench, that the scene blurred. He blinked. Someone was standing at the gate now. He—it was a he—pressed a button to his right. A buzzing sound followed, and the gate popped open.

Another squeaking sound, more robust this time, as the old hinges turned, the gate opened, and Andrew stepped through it.