Lucie glanced covertly at the people seated around her. She loved checking people out and making up stories in her mind about them. On her left was a young, attractive Italian couple, looking longingly into each other’s eyes—on their honeymoon, possibly? To her right were two smartly dressed men: an American guy with dark blond hair in a blue-striped T-shirt and navy blazer talking to an Asian guy with a goatee wearing a pair of round 1930s retro-style sunglasses. They looked like they worked in fashion and were here on business. She overheard the Asian guy saying, “I need to remember to get sandals made for Alexandra and Jackie,” and she wondered if it was because he noticed her shopping bag from Da Costanzo. Behind her were two middle-aged women smoking and having an intense discussion in German while a humongous Great Dane sat quietly at their heels. Were they sisters rehashing an old family feud?

Within a few minutes, the waiter returned and placed a large glass bowl on her table containing a mountain of slushy lemon granita, accompanied by a single thin slice of cantaloupe wedged onto the rim of the glass. Lucie smiled in delight at the dessert before her. It reminded her of the desserts she loved getting at Serendipity when she was a kid, although this presentation looked decidedly more elegant.

She sat at her table sipping the granita contentedly from the straw. It was deliciously icy, and the freshly squeezed lemon juice was so refreshingly tart as it went down her throat. She was wondering if she should take a nibble of the cantaloupe now or save it for after she finished the granita when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a tall, elderly white-haired man enter the piazzetta, wobble slightly, and then stumble against the table where the Italian couple was seated. The Italian man sprang up from his chair and helped the man to his feet. The old man stood for a split second, took a step forward, and then went crashing down again, his head landing right onto Lucie’s dessert, breaking the glass bowl and splashing lemon granita all over her.

Lucie found herself glued to her chair, unable to move. It seemed as if time had stopped. No one did a thing. The Italian couple stared helplessly at the old man, the Germans just sat there, and the waiters stood like statues. All around them were dozens of glamorous-looking people, frozen at their tables and gawking. She heard the American beside her say, “I think he’s dying,” and then somewhere behind her, a lady with a British accent cried, “We. Simply. Must!” The man’s eyes rolled back, she heard a rattle deep in his throat, and his face turned blue, but all she could see was red—the red blood vessels in the whites of his eyes, the red gushing from his head onto the white tablecloth. She finally stood up, and then she felt the ground beneath her spin and everything went black.

Lucie had no idea how long she had been unconscious, maybe it was just seconds, but when she came to, she felt something warm and soft cradling her neck. She looked up and saw George Zao looking down at her and realized that his hands were cushioning her head.

“You okay?” he asked.

She nodded, and then she turned and saw a waiter hovering over the old man, who was now lying on the ground in front of her. The waiter was pounding on the man’s chest repeatedly as the Great Dane started whimpering.

“Just stay here. Don’t try to get up,” George said, jumping up and heading toward the man on the ground. “Stop hitting him like that.” He pushed the waiter aside. “Someone call a doctor!” he shouted, as he bent down, lifted the man’s chin, and gave him two quick rescue breaths.

Lucie got up from the ground slowly and began backing away from the scene. George was now frantically pumping the man’s chest and yelling, “Fucking call a doctor!” Something within her told her that she couldn’t look anymore. She couldn’t stand there and watch this man die. She turned around and started walking away. The minute she rounded the corner, out of sight of the piazzetta, she started to run.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Arco Naturale

Capri, Italy

George found Lucie sitting on a stone bench, staring out at the Arco Naturale, a gigantic natural limestone arch that rose out of the mountainside 650 feet above the sea.fn1

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Lucie fixed her eyes out on the view, purposely not looking at him. She knew there were bloodstains on his shirt, and she couldn’t bear to see them. “How did you know I was here?”

“I didn’t. After leaving the piazzetta, I just felt like coming here.”

Lucie could feel her jaw tighten. Why was he always showing up where she least wanted him to be? She got up from the bench and leaned against the green iron fence that faced the sea, hoping he would get the message.

George inhaled, as if about to say something.

“Please … don’t speak! Please don’t tell me what happened to that man. I don’t want to know,” Lucie blurted in a choked voice.

George walked up to the fence and stood near her. Just beyond the fence, the arch towered over them, rising so unexpectedly and improbably out of the cliff it looked like it could have been placed there by aliens. Through the arch was a perfect view of the sea hundreds of feet below, the water glowing in lustrous shades of aquamarine.

They took in the otherworldly view in silence, and after a while, George spoke. “The first time I came here, when I was about twelve, I was so blown away by the sight of this arch that I thought it had to be a vortex. Like maybe some sort of gateway to a parallel universe. I wanted to leap through the arch and be transported somewhere else in time.”

“I wouldn’t mind being somewhere else in time right about now,” Lucie said numbly.

“Follow me.” George moved suddenly, and Lucie thought for a second that he was actually going to hop over the fence. Instead, he began heading toward the trail that led down the mountainside. She debated whether she wanted to follow him and then thought, What the hell?

Lucie walked a few paces behind George as they headed along a steep paved trail and then down a long set of steps that wound along the thickly forested part of the island.

“Pablo Neruda would hike this trail every day when he lived on the island,” George said.

Lucie said nothing, but she was surprised by this bit of trivia coming from George. He didn’t seem like the type to read poetry. At the bottom of the steps, they rounded a corner and she found herself standing at the mouth of a cavern. She realized with an unexpected jolt that they were at the Grotta di Matermania. It was one of the places she had put on her must-see list—a natural cavern that was one of the most ancient archaeological treasures of the island.fn2

“You wanted to go somewhere back in time, so here we are,” George said.

Lucie wandered into the cavern, where walls and stairways had been carved out of the limestone to create different levels and spaces within. This was once a nymphaeum for the ancient Romans, she thought, placing her hand against the cavern walls, strangely warm to the touch, and wondering what mystical rituals these ruins must have witnessed through the ages. She could feel a strange energy pulsating throughout the cave, the same energy she felt when she had visited other ancient sites, like Stonehenge and the Mayan temples at Tulum.

At the back of the cavern rose a natural formation that resembled an altar, no doubt the focal point of ceremonies when the cavern was itself a temple. Lucie climbed up to stand in front of the altar and closed her eyes. She wasn’t religious by any means—her mother’s family was Buddhist and her father’s was nominally Episcopalian—but something compelled her to say a silent prayer for the man in the piazzetta.