Chapter 38: What She Left Behind
They drove to Lugano in the morning.
Not flew — drove. Adriano had made the decision without explaining it and Élise had understood without asking. Some journeys needed the ground beneath them. Needed the particular transition of landscape — the Lombardy plain giving way to the foothills, the foothills giving way to the mountains, the mountains opening suddenly and completely onto the lake as if the geography had been saving it, had been building toward it, had decided that the reveal deserved the approach.
She had driven this road before — the night they left Milan after the gala, the emergency Lugano trip that had started everything. She had sat in the back of a company car and watched the mountains arrive in the dark and thought about emerald dresses and vault mechanics and a man who held things so carefully they left no marks.
