Prologue
VIOLETTA
The first time I see Santino, I don’t know how old he is, but I am 12, and he is a man. Though I expect him to carry all the subtle and seductive dangers of men, his menace is controlled, with the direction and force of gravity.
He comes to my uncle’s house, where I’ve lived since I was a child, after my parents were shot in the streets of Naples.
He stands at the door. Sunlight behind him. Silhouette of a god. Perfect. Michelangelo’s David, saying my uncle’s name—Guglielmo—with an accent that sounds like the wind in the grape vines and the voice of a volcano consciously choosing not to erupt.
My Zia Madeline hustles me into the kitchen, but he’s already let himself in, and for the moment he’s in the doorframe, daylight is shut out. The shadows become the light, and I see him with eyes still tightly closed against the sun.
A girl cannot cry hard enough to summon a devil like him. All her pain won’t be enough to drive him out of hell.
I’m different.
When he lays eyes on me, Zia pulls me away, but a part of me stays where his attention pins me. He’s powerful enough to separate me from my ghost. So even though I’m behind a closed door with Zia, I’m also in the hallway with him, in that moment forever, when the darkness in his eyes recognized the darkness in mine.
1
VIOLETTA
“Incoming!”
The deep voice echoes off the library’s high ceiling just as a paper airplane whizzes over Scarlett’s shoulder and drops on my anatomy book. Scarlett yips in surprise, looking behind her at a group of backwards-cap-wearing, goatee-sporting frat boys in shirts with arm holes bigger than their IQs. One jogs toward us under the pretense of retrieving his projectile. The librarian abandons her desk and strides to them like a woman ready to single-handedly tear down the patriarchy.
“Hey,” Goatee greets me with a smile. His teeth must have cost his parents a fortune, but no amount of money can hide eyes dulled by entitlement. “You wanna keep that?” He juts his chin to the plane that is perched on my textbook. The name RANDY is scrawled on a wing over ten digits.
“You can keep it if you want,” his friend says with a wink.
Casually, I pass the plane back. Goatee takes the hint with the grace of a newborn Labrador and turns his attention to Scarlett. Before he can offer her his number, the librarian’s heels click over.
“Back to your seats,” she whispers sotto, shouting and hissing at the same time, which they must teach you in library school. “Or go.” Her arm juts to the side, one long red nail directed to the door. Between the heels and the nails, I suspect she has an exciting life outside the university library.
“This?” I wave my hand at the entirety of the library and the boorish douchebags swaggering out of it. “I won’t miss.”
“You don’t like being interrupted by a couple of keggerheads?” Scarlett sniffs. She’s never been the one to care about the frat boys, but give her a brooding loner, and she falls down swooning. “Maybe rethink your summer in Greece, then. I mean, fraternities are Greek. It’s probably in their blood.”
Our summer plans were always varied, but I hadn’t left the United States since I arrived from Italy as an orphaned five-year-old, so I could barely wait to get to my trip to Santorini and Malta.
“They’re European,” I reply, totally invested in my daydream of relaxing train rides from beach to pristine beach, where all the boys wear caps frontward and their facial hair commits fully to either a beard or skin. “Different.”
“Men are the same everywhere.” Scarlett flips her own page. “Be careful you’ll get…you know?”
“Sunburned?”
“Is that what you call it in Italian?”
A hard shush comes from the librarian’s desk.
“This is my leap into adulthood.” I straighten myself up as tall as possible. “Not a leap into kissing my way across southern Europe.”
Mostly. Kind of. My hopes and fears were pretty similar.
“Well,” Scarlett whispers. “Summer can’t happen until we pass this trauma unit final.” She flips to chapter five.
An old familiar itch settles between my shoulder blades, one that chases me during every study session imagining myself faced with true bodily trauma, and knowing exactly what to do about it.
Prevent further injury, stabilize, transport if necessary. That’s it. Everything else feeds into those steps, and nothing else matters in an emergency.
All I’ve ever wanted to do was be a nurse, and learning about minimizing shock and stopping bleeding never feels like studying. It’s natural, like an extension of my body.
“I think I’m just going to go home.” I shoulder my satchel. “You’ll be okay without me?”
“Will you be okay without me?” She waggles her brows, and I smile. We’re talking about two completely different things, and we’re both going to be just fine.
The exam that evening is less a breeze and more a light wind, but I finish early and get on the bus home over the river to Secondo Vasto—Little Vasto, after the part of Naples we’re all from—where I have lived since being brought to America when I was five.
My friends roll their eyes at my poor study habits, so I was good and double-checked my work even though I knew I got them all right. Some things are serious enough to stick the first time you hear them. The difference between life and death isn’t something you should forget.
I love Scarlett and all my friends, but they don’t know the real me, anyway. Not really. They accept I’m reserved about my family and life across the river and leave it at that. They stopped asking why I don’t date or hit all the parties a long time ago, because they couldn’t understand why—in this day and age—I’d be so invested in keeping my virginity indefinitely for a man I didn’t even know yet.
Americans just don’t get the old world. Napoli. How different things are there. Zio and Zia—Italian for aunt and uncle—have high expectations for me, and I can’t let them down. Families don’t work that way where I’m from. My sister died of pneumonia in a southern Italian backwater because the hospitals are too far away. I’m all my Z’s have left. Disappointing them isn’t an option. Besides, they pay for my schooling and are sending me off on the most amazing summer vacation.
So, even though I feel more American than Italian, I keep the customs of my forefathers. If I didn’t have to please my Z’s, I’m pretty sure I’d become a boy-crazy, party-loving, Miss Apple Pie faster than a bald eagle dives for prey.
It’s perfect today. Mild weather, bright sunny skies, a cool breeze. Sounds just like my summer plans in Greece, except maybe hotter and with more tanning oil. A place where I can find a beautiful man, one real man, to whisk me away from here. Not like these slobs on the bus, but someone romantic and cultured and rough all the same. Impassioned and intelligent. A man who can’t take his eyes off me.
If such a man exists in Europe, I’m going to find him. It’s my summer of summers, where I’ll be swept off my feet by a beautiful stranger. And then we’ll part ways, tragically, in the heat of August. He’ll beg me to marry him and I’ll tearfully put him off to finish school, and one day, he’ll show up in Secondo Vasto because he couldn’t live without me another minute. I’ll get my nursing degree while he works, then we’ll get married in a traditional Italian wedding with all the trimmings and have babies.