The stairs up to Serena Nardi’s office are bolted to the outside of a yellow building on the front at Menaggio, above a shop that sells sunglasses and postcards to Germans, and at ten to eight on the fifteenth of October they were wet, and there was nobody on them but me.
I had a file under my arm. Grey cardboard, soft at the corners, MARISOL — PRATICA down the spine in my father’s pencil. He started it in the June of 2024, the month I came home for good, and in the August he drove me down to this office in the van with the seat belt that sticks and sat with his hat on his knee while I signed my name four times.
Below me the first boat of the morning was coming in from Varenna across water with no wind on it at all, and the lake…
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