Dinner was at eight.
The dining room was the formal one, the long table that could have seated twenty set for three at the end nearest the windows, an intimacy constructed within a grandeur which I was coming to understand was the particular Salvatore aesthetic, the large and the personal existing simultaneously without apparent contradiction.
Antonio Salvatore was already seated when we arrived.
He stood when I came in, which I had not expected, which was the kind of detail that landed quietly and stayed. He stood the way a man stands when he has decided to stand, deliberately and without making a production of it, and he gestured toward the chair to his right and I sat and Matteo sat across from me and the meal began with the particular, unhurried ceremony of an Italian household that
