The First Dinner
The first dinner happened by accident, which was the only way a thing like that was ever going to happen with Sara Bonnet.
Giulia had been staying at the pensione down in the village — a single room above a kitchen run by a woman called Teresa, who fed her breakfast and largely ignored her in exchange for forty-five euros a night and the dignity of silence. She walked up to the lighthouse every morning at seven-thirty and walked back at six, and she had been doing this for ten days when, on the Wednesday of the second week, the weather broke.
Not badly. A front came through from the southwest at about four in the afternoon, the kind of rain that was not dangerous but was inconvenient in a specifically Ligurian way — wind-driven, sideways, wet enough to get through any jacket that was not actually sealed. They had been working in the cistern room, which had been the best part of the day and also the wettest part of the building. Giulia had laddered fresh photographs of a seam above the cistern vault, Sara had fetched her father's logbooks from 1987 — 1987, for reasons Giulia would explain later, turned out to matter — and they were in the middle of something that they were both enjoying without having quite admitted it when the wind outside picked up and the path down to the village became, in one definition, impassable.
"You're not going down tonight," Sara said.
"I can go