The Lake Como Mistake

Chapter 1: The Overnight Bag

The overnight bag was the first mistake.

Lucia Morosini stood in the middle of her Brooklyn apartment — a railroad-style one-bedroom above a laundromat on Carroll Street — and surveyed the contents of her duffle bag with the quiet satisfaction of a woman who had packed efficiently. Seven days in Italy. One bag. She'd rolled everything into tight little cylinders the way her mother had taught her, and the whole operation fit neatly beside her toiletry kit and a dog-eared copy of Elena Ferrante she'd been meaning to finish for two years.

"You're bringing one bag," Patrick said. It wasn't a question. He was leaning against the doorframe of her bedroom, arms crossed, wearing that expression she'd come to recognize over two years of dating — the one that meant he was calculating how to say something without actually saying it.

"It's a birthday party, Patrick. A long weekend."

"It's a week."

"A week in which I will need clothes, a toothbrush, and my passport. All of which are in this bag." She zipped it with a flourish. "See? Efficient."

Patrick Farrell was the kind of man who made efficiency look like an accident. He was tall, angular, with the sort of quietly handsome face that improved the longer you looked at it — like a building designed by someone who actually cared about proportions. Which made sense, because he was an architect. He designed mid-rise residential buildings in Red Hook and talked about load-bearing walls the way some men talked about sports. Lucia found this unbearably attractive, though she would never have admitted it in those terms.

"Maybe bring a second bag," he said carefully.

"Why would I bring a second bag?"

"Just... in case."

"In case of what? In case Italy has a sudden climate shift and I need a parka?"

He opened his mouth, closed it, then smiled in a way that didn't reach his eyes. "You're right. One bag is fine."

This should have been her first clue. Patrick Farrell never conceded an argument that easily. In two years together, she had watched him spend forty-five minutes debating the optimal angle for a bookshelf with a carpenter. He had once sent back a set of architectural plans seven times because the window mullions were three millimeters off. The man did not surrender.

But she was too busy being excited to notice.

Italy. She was going to Italy.

Lucia had been to Italy once, when she was eleven, to visit her mother's family in a small town outside Naples. She remembered sweating through her clothes, eating her weight in sfogliatelle, and being kissed on both cheeks by approximately forty-seven relatives whose names she immediately forgot. Her mother's people were carpenters, bakers, and one uncle who claimed to have been a professional soccer player but who, upon further investigation, had once kicked a ball in a municipal park while a scout happened to be walking his dog nearby.

Patrick's family, she understood, was similar. Italian. Modest. Maybe a little more polished — his mother's name was Elisabetta, which sounded fancy, but Lucia's aunt was named Concetta, which sounded like a Renaissance painting, and she worked at a dry cleaner's in Bay Ridge. Names meant nothing.

"Your grandmother is going to love me," Lucia announced, hoisting the duffle onto her shoulder.

"She already loves you. I showed her that video of you teaching your kids the tarantella."

"See? Cultural common ground. I'll bring her some of those cookies from Mazzola's. Old Italian ladies love cookies from Mazzola's. It's a universal constant."

Patrick picked up his own suitcase — a proper suitcase, she noticed, hard-sided and large enough to smuggle a small child — and said nothing.

The second clue she missed.

---

The flight was uneventful. They flew economy because Lucia had insisted on splitting the cost of the tickets, and she was a kindergarten teacher at P.S. 372 in Park Slope, which meant her budget operated on the same general principles as a lemonade stand. Patrick had offered to pay for both tickets, and she had refused with the cheerful stubbornness that was, depending on who you asked, either her best quality or her most infuriating one.

"I can pay for my own ticket," she'd said.

"I know you can."

"Then let me."

"Lucia —"

"Patrick."

He'd looked at her for a long moment, then nodded. Economy it was.

She spent the flight reading, sleeping, and eating a truly dismal airline pasta that she photographed and sent to her mother with the caption: "An insult to our ancestors." Her mother replied with seventeen crying-laughing emojis and a voice memo that was just eight seconds of cackling.

Lucia loved her mother. Rosa Morosini was a retired school secretary who lived in Bensonhurst and treated every phone call like it might be her last, packing each conversation with enough advice, gossip, and unsolicited commentary to fill a novella. She had met Patrick exactly three times and approved of him on the grounds that he was "quiet, which means he'll let you talk, which is good because God knows you need someone who'll let you talk."

Rosa did not know that Patrick's family was wealthy. To be fair, neither did Lucia.

Or rather — and this was the part that would later make her want to scream into a decorative Italian throw pillow — she had been given every opportunity to know and had simply not paid attention.

There had been signs. Patrick's apartment in DUMBO was suspiciously nice for a thirty-two-year-old architect who claimed to work at a "small firm." The firm, she would later learn, was a boutique practice that he owned, funded by a trust fund the size of a small nation's GDP. His clothes were simple but fit perfectly, which she'd attributed to good taste rather than bespoke tailoring. He never talked about money, which she'd interpreted as modesty rather than the particular silence of someone who has so much of it that mentioning it would be like a fish mentioning water.

And then there was the name. Farrell-Contarini. She'd seen it once, on a piece of mail at his apartment, and he'd said it was "the full family name, it's a whole thing, Italian bureaucracy," and she'd laughed and moved on because she was late for a parent-teacher conference and didn't have time to investigate anyone's bureaucratic naming conventions.

So when they landed at Milan Malpensa and walked through arrivals, Lucia was expecting a taxi. Maybe a nice taxi. Maybe one of those Mercedes ones she'd seen in movies.

What she was not expecting was the driver.

He was standing just past the barrier, holding a sign that read FARRELL-CONTARINI in crisp black letters. He was wearing a uniform. An actual uniform, with brass buttons and a peaked cap, like something out of a period drama. Behind him, visible through the glass doors, was a car that Lucia could only describe as "aggressively expensive." It was black, long, and so polished that she could see her own reflection in the hood — a short, dark-haired woman in jeans and a Brooklyn Cyclones t-shirt, holding a duffle bag and a box of cookies, looking like she'd wandered into the wrong movie.

"Patrick," she said.

"Yeah?"

"Why is there a man in a uniform holding a sign with your name on it?"

"That's Giancarlo. He's the driver."

"The driver."

"The family driver."

"Your family has a driver."

Patrick took a breath. "Lucia —"

"With a hat."

"It's more of a cap."

"Patrick. Why does your family have a driver with a cap?"

Giancarlo, who had spotted them, was already approaching with the smooth efficiency of a man who had been retrieving Farrells from airports for decades. He took Patrick's suitcase, nodded respectfully, and then turned to Lucia with a warm smile.

"Signorina Morosini. Benvenuta. May I take your bag?"

"It's just a duffle," Lucia said, clutching it like a life preserver.

"Of course, signorina." He took it anyway, with the gentle authority of someone who was not actually asking.

They followed him to the car. It was, upon closer inspection, even more expensive than it had looked from a distance. The interior was cream leather. There was a small refrigerator. There was a partition between the front and back seats. There was, unless Lucia was hallucinating from jet lag, a crystal decanter.

"Patrick," she said again, as Giancarlo closed the door and they glided out of the airport with the silence of a vehicle that cost more than her apartment building.

"I know."

"You need to start talking."

"I know."

"Right now."

He rubbed his face with both hands, a gesture she recognized as his pre-confession ritual. She'd seen it when he admitted he'd accidentally thrown away her favorite spatula, and again when he confessed he'd never actually seen The Godfather, which she considered a relationship-threatening revelation.

This, she suspected, was going to be worse than the spatula.

"Okay," he said. "So. My family might be... a little more comfortable than I've let on."

"Comfortable."

"Wealthy."

"How wealthy?"

He looked out the window at the Lombardy countryside streaming past. "Do you know the fashion house Contarini?"

"Contarini. Like the brand? Like the handbags? Like the handbags my friend Dina saved up for six months to buy?"

"That's... that's my mother's family's company."

The silence that followed was so complete that Lucia could hear the leather seats creaking.

"Your mother's family," she said slowly, "owns Contarini."

"Well, technically my grandfather started the fashion division, but the family has been — the name goes back to — look, it's complicated."

"Uncomplicate it."

"My mother is Elisabetta Contarini. She married my father, James Farrell, who's American. Irish-American, actually, from Connecticut. He runs the North American operations. The family also has... some property."

"Some property."

"In Como. And Portofino. And Milan. And there's a palazzo in Venice but nobody really uses it anymore except for events."

"A palazzo. In Venice."

"It's not as big as it sounds."

"Patrick. It's a palazzo."

He turned to face her, and she saw something in his expression she hadn't expected: fear. Not the casual anxiety of a man who'd been caught in a fib, but genuine, gut-level fear that he was about to lose something important.

"I didn't tell you because I didn't want it to matter," he said quietly. "In New York, I'm just me. I'm the guy who designs buildings and eats bad Thai food on your couch and argues with you about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. That's who I am. That's who I want to be."

"It is a Christmas movie," Lucia said automatically, because some debates transcended context.

"The point is, every time I've told someone about my family, it changes things. They start acting different. They get weird about money, or they get too comfortable with money, or they start treating me like an access point instead of a person. I didn't want that with you. I wanted you to like me for me."

"I do like you for you, you absolute walnut. But you let me pack one duffle bag for a week at what is apparently the Italian Downton Abbey."

A tiny smile cracked through his anxiety. "It's not Downton Abbey."

"Does it have more than ten rooms?"

"...Define 'rooms.'"

"Oh my God."

"It's going to be fine. My family is going to love you."

Lucia looked down at her Brooklyn Cyclones t-shirt, her sneakers, and the box of Mazzola's cookies sitting on the seat between them.

"Patrick," she said. "I brought bakery cookies as a gift for your grandmother. Your grandmother who apparently owns a fashion empire."

"She'll love the cookies."

"She probably has a personal pastry chef."

"She does, but his cannoli are terrible. Don't tell him I said that."

Lucia leaned back against the cream leather and closed her eyes. Through the window, the Italian countryside was giving way to the outskirts of something greener, more mountainous. She could smell lake water and cypress and the particular scent of old money, which, it turned out, smelled exactly like new car leather and quiet panic.

"I'm going to need you to tell me everything," she said. "Every single thing. Starting with how many people are going to be at this party and ending with whether I need to curtsy to anyone."

"No curtsying. Probably."

"Probably?"

"There might be a countess."

"I'm going to kill you."

"That's fair."

Giancarlo, behind the partition, drove on in diplomatic silence.