My father was in the garden.
This was unusual enough that I stopped when I saw him through the study window, stopped and looked for a moment before continuing, because Antonio Salvatore in the garden at this hour was not a configuration I had a reference point for. He was a man of interiors, of studies and dining rooms and the specific controlled environments of rooms that he had arranged to his purpose, where the furniture and the light and the architecture of the space communicated what he needed it to communicate and the people in it responded accordingly. The garden was not a space he controlled. The garden was a space that simply was what it was regardless of who was in it, and my father did not naturally inhabit spaces that operated outside his influence.
He was standing near the f
