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you picked up the basics by osmosis. You could go to that famous French cooking school, Le Cordon Bleu.”
    That had been one of the first hints that John Reardon wouldn’t be devastated if an ocean separated them.
    I’m not a cook, she thought then and now, the memory of her grandmother clutching her stomach in pain because ofseven-year-old Holly forcing its way into her mind. She wished she could get back the way she’d felt that day in the kitchen, when she hadn’t realized she was sprinkling rat poison on her grandmother’s lunch. The wonder and intrigue and possibilities and fun of choosing ingredients. She wanted . . . what? To feel the way she did in her grandmother’s kitchen that day. Completely absorbed in what she was doing. In love with what she was doing. Confident, despite her inability to roll the pasta thin enough without ripping it, something her grandmother never did. And like she belonged, despite everything. She’d never felt that way anywhere else but in Camilla’s Cucinotta. And now that it was hers, she was scared. Despite not having a clue how to cook, how to teach people how to cook, she felt inexplicably safe in this house, in the kitchen.
    Holly gripped the stones tighter in her palm. Tell me I can do this. Just tell me that. But the stones said nothing. She didn’t expect them to, of course, but she wouldn’t mind a sign. A crackle of lightning, perhaps.
    She sighed and put the stones back in the pouch and onto the bedside table. She’d slept in the other bedroom since she’d come a month ago and for the past two weeks since Camilla had passed. The room she’d slept in every summer of her childhood. It was the smaller of the two bedrooms upstairs, but Holly still wasn’t ready to move into her grandmother’s beautiful master bedroom with the ornate bed she had shipped from Milan when she’d first moved to Blue Crab Island. For the past two weeks Holly had kept the door to both rooms open so that Camilla’s spirit would flow through into her bedroom. Andbecause Holly loved looking inside, loved sitting on the bed with its pristine white covers, loved looking at the painting of the Po River stones, at the large painting of the Po River that had soothed her grandmother to sleep every night.
    Holly glanced at the photos on the dresser, of her parents, and one of her mother as a little girl and another as a teenager, and she tried to imagine her mother disliking this magical house, biding her time until she could leave at eighteen. Her mother’s childhood room, which had become Holly’s room, held nothing of Italy or her heritage; it was full of white Maine cottage furniture and glass bowls of seashells. Holly’s mother found Camilla and her sexy dresses, fortune-telling, and busybody matchmaking an embarrassment and left the “creepy” island the minute she could to settle in a suburb of Boston, where she lived with Holly’s father, who had no appreciation of his exotic mother-in-law or Blue Crab Island. Luciana Maguire couldn’t understand why Holly wanted to spend as much time as possible on the island when she herself had wanted to escape, but Holly’s mother never claimed to understand her. And so Holly spent every school vacation and summer with her grandmother and loved the island and the lore surrounding Camilla. She’d grown up with comforting assurances of what was to come (a constant “You will be fine,” which Holly believed, whereas her own mother, a self-professed realist who didn’t believe in “that nonsense,” was just a big old cynic).
    Growing up, when Holly used to spend an entire month every summer on Blue Crab Island, the locals would ask Holly if she’d inherited her grandmother’s gift of “knowing.” Shehadn’t. She could not, as Camilla Constantina could, assess someone and know that her true love wasn’t the man beside her but the next man she’d meet, perhaps at the supermarket. Or that she really shouldn’t wear her new suede boots the