Her Sugar Mask

Chapter Nine — Lemons

She packed the bag at four in the morning and then unpacked it, because she had put the knife where she could not reach it with her right hand.

Then she sat at the table and wrote the list properly, on the stolen phone, in the notes app, the way her father had taught her to write things down. Not in her head. In her head, everything was loud.

1. Take the ledgers. Tonight or never.

2. Not the buses. Buses have cameras and drivers who remember faces.

3. €4,340 is not enough to disappear. It is enough to reach a city.

4. Matteo Ferrante knows three things about me. Find out how many he can prove.

5. The man in the grey jacket is not here to talk.

6. The silver knife is not a weapon. Pack it anyway.

She read the six lines twice. She did not add a seventh. Lists of seven were how her father had ended up with a boat.

· · ·

She had meant to go at five, before the square woke up, with the key on the string and nothing else.

At ten past eight Nunzia opened the door without knocking and put a crate on the table.

"Sit down."

Giulia looked at the crate. Lemons, forty of them, the big ones with the thick skin, still dusty from the tree.

"No," Giulia said.

"No what."

"I'm working today."

"You're working here." Nunzia took off her cardigan and folded it over the back of a chair. "Nobody in this town has put up lemons since my sister died in 2016 and the whole village ate from that woman's jars for four years afterward. It's a disgrace."

"I have to go out."

"You'll go out at eleven." Nunzia picked up a knife. "Watch."

· · ·

It was not a recipe. It was a method, and it took three hours.

Coarse salt, not fine. Jars sterilised in the oven at 120 degrees for twenty minutes, because Nunzia did not believe in boiling water. Lemons quartered lengthways but not all the way through, so the fruit opened like a hand.

"Brace the jar between your knees," Nunzia said.

Giulia put the jar between her knees. It held.

"You have one hand," Nunzia said. "So you arrange everything before you start cutting. Knife on the right, salt on the left, jar in the middle. You don't reach for anything twice."

Giulia arranged everything.

"Now cut."

She cut.

The smell came up out of the first lemon and stopped her with the knife halfway through the second cut.

It was not a complicated smell. Salt and oil and the sharp green of the pith. It was the smell of a kitchen in September, in a house where somebody had been standing at the counter all afternoon.

Nunzia said, "Whoever it was, he's not here."

Giulia did not answer. She finished the cut and pushed the lemon into the jar and reached for the salt.

"I wasn't thinking about him," she said.

"No," Nunzia said. "You were thinking about who you were the last time you smelled that."

Giulia put her wrist on the edge of the table and pressed, because her right hand had started shaking and she did not want to drop salt all over the floor.

"Say that again," she said, "and I'll put salt in your coffee."

"I drink it black."

"I'll put it in the sugar bowl."

Nunzia laughed. It was a short laugh, the laugh of a woman who had buried a husband and did not intend to be managed by anybody ever again.

They filled two jars.

· · ·

"You can go," Nunzia said, when the jars were sealed and wiped and standing on the table with the date written on the lids in biro. "Nobody here will stop you. But the jar has to be finished first."

"Why."

"Because things that are started badly stay bad." Nunzia put the knife down. "My first husband left a wall half built. Thirty-one years I looked at that wall."

"What happened to it."

"I finished it myself in 1998." Nunzia picked up the crate. "That's the story. It's not a good story."

She went out with the crate. At the door she turned round.

"There's a sagra on Saturday. The lemon festival. They postpone it every year because of rain and hold it in the end because of shame. Don't leave before Saturday."

"I'll think about it."

"Think about it with your hands," Nunzia said, "not with your head. Your head lies to you."

· · ·

That night she took one of the two jars up the olive road and set it on the step in front of his door.

She did not leave a note. She did not knock. She stood in the rain for a moment with the jar at her feet and her hand on the door and then she took her hand off it and went back down.

· · ·

She slept for four hours in the chair, because of the bed, and when she woke the door of the house was ajar.

She had latched it. She always latched it. The latch was up and the door was two centimetres open, and the rain had blown in onto the tiles.

She did not go in. She stood in the square and looked at the door for a full minute, and then she went round the back, and she came in through the window, and she went along the wall with her back to it and the knife in her right hand.

The room was empty.

The bag was on the bed where she had left it. The envelope with the money was in the bag. The phone was in the bag. The ledgers were not in the bag, because she had not got them yet.

On the table, the sock was lying unrolled.

She crossed to it and picked it up.

The knife was inside. He had taken it out, put it down, and rolled the sock back up loosely — not the way she rolled it, tight, in one movement from the toe.

She stood with the sock in her hand.

Then she looked at the floor by the window.

One footprint, wet, on the tiles. Size 43. Toe pointing into the room.

She counted what the footprint told her. One man. He came alone, in the rain, through the window she had climbed out of an hour before. He had stood by the bed long enough to leave water on the floor, and he had not taken the money, and he had not taken the phone, and he had not torn the ledger — because he had not come for those things. He had come to see whether she slept with the knife under her hand, the way a man checks if a trap is set before he springs it.

The man in the grey jacket. Turi's man. The one who had cut her arm in the mill and would have asked her questions she could not answer. He had been in this room while she slept four feet away, and he had let her sleep, because a man who wants you alive wants you calm, and a calm woman is easier to take, and Turi took what he wanted, always, through the door he had built for it.

He had come to decide whether to wait for her.

He had decided yes.