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Isla’s Point of View
“Good day, Signorina Harper.”
“Hello Matteo.”
I smiled sweetly, suppressing ten thousand questions, the first of which began with: how could you? He waved a polite hand to the chair across from his desk, an old, loved wooden one with a brass-studded red leather cushion that felt more comfortable than I expected.
Signora Elena arrived with a cappuccino and a small plate with another cannoli. I smiled.
“Thank you for the coffee, but I already ate a cannoli.”
She stood, studied me for a moment as a parent regards a child turning their nose up at spinach.
“You met Enzo?”
“He brought me here.”
“Ah, while delivering his cannoli?”
“Yes.”
“I shall leave the treat where it is. A gift should never be recalled, and we shall see how iron your will is.”
She giggled, like a girl, not at all like a woman her age. As she exited the door, she called back.
“In any case, you can run it off tomorrow for your new audience.”
My expression must have turned to horror because Matteo laughed and shook his head.
“You will get used to it, Isla Harper.”
“Can’t you call me Isla?”
“Of course… with your permission. Thank you, Isla.”
“It’s just-”
I moved in the chair, more posturing than trying to find any comfort, while I studied him carefully. Matteo was harder to read than most men, not officious, not unfriendly, but not the opposites of those either.
He leaned forward.
“How could I sit there and not tell you who I was?”
“While I fed your baby, who, by the way, is the cutest human being I know. Utterly adorable. And your wife…”
My voice tailed off. I was chattering while he stared, smiling, happy about something I couldn’t fathom. Proud father and husband, yes, but there was something more lawyerly coursing underneath that.
He leaned forward, lifted a fountain pen, and wrote something on a page in a file marked: Aunt Agatha. No surname. That meant something. He read what he wrote, smiled at the page, then his pen hovered, a moment too long, and he shook his head, almost imperceptibly, whispering:
“Non ancora.”
He looked up and smiled again while I sipped my coffee.
“Nice coffee.”
“Your Aunt’s favorite.”
“Like the cannoli?”
“Yes. She also liked Luca. My son was her delight as well.”
“She had good taste.”
Few things please any parent more than someone praising their children and Matteo was no exception, but there was something else going on in the room that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
I felt uncomfortable diving for a pen to sign for my inheritance, so I eased back in the chair, looking and feeling as though I could stay right there all day. Matteo lifted his cannoli and ceremoniously bit into it. Now I saw the real man, loving husband, proud father, and lover of Enzo’s baking.
I caved in and joined him.
“Are you happy, Isla?”
“I miss my parents and in-laws.”
“Really? Your in-laws.”
He looked at me as though I’d grown two heads. I finished the treat, patted my lips with a small napkin, collecting sugary dust, and smiled.
“I love Karl’s parents too.”
“That’s nice.”
He looked genuinely impressed, glanced once at his file as though something in there might be relevant, decided it wasn’t, and held my gaze again.
“I heard you received a gift. Dinner?”
“Yes. Two Sicilian Rock Partridge, but I don’t know why.”
“Maybe a kindness, or encouragement.”
“Encouragement?”
“Perhaps you did something someone liked, and they wish to encourage you to do it more.”
My cheeks flushed, and so did his.
“I didn’t mean the run, Isla.”
“Ah, but you knew about it?”
“Of course. What I meant was, maybe you showed a kindness that deserved a reward.”
He uncapped his fountain pen with the quiet ceremony of a man who still believed signing things by hand mattered and slid three pages across the desk in sequence. Each one required only my signature — Isla Harper, written in the space beside a small penciled cross — and his witness. The whole thing took four minutes.
Four minutes to inherit forty hectares, a centuries-old villa, and a taverna full of secrets.
He blotted the last page, squared the papers, and returned them to the file. Then he sat back.
“The residency condition is the primary obligation. Twelve months from the date of your arrival. You may not leave the island for more than seventy-two consecutive hours during that period without forfeiting the estate entirely.”
“I understand.”
“There may be further provisions.”
He said it the way a doctor mentions a follow-up appointment — routine, unhurried, already moving on.
“Small matters. They will reveal themselves in time. I wouldn’t trouble yourself about them now.”
I opened my mouth. He was already standing, hand extended.
“Welcome to Sicily, Isla. Truly.”
I shook it. His grip was warm and brief and told me nothing. From behind the closed inner door, a voice rose — then another, sharper, cutting across the first. Not quite shouting, but close.
Matteo’s expression didn’t change. He simply glanced toward the sound with the patience of a man who had heard this particular music many times before.
He crossed to the door and opened it.
“Signora Elena.”
She was already on her feet, smoothing her skirt with one hand and reaching for her ledger with the other, the picture of calm readiness.
“I know, Matteo. Coffee.”
“Decaf, please.”
Two men occupied the chairs where the parrot couple had sat. Both were standing now — one broad and red-faced, gesturing with a rolled document, the other smaller, his arms folded, jaw set. Between them, the argument moved in rapid Sicilian that I couldn’t follow, though the body language was universal.
Signora Elena caught my eye as I stepped into the outer office. Her expression said everything: Welcome to every Tuesday.
She leaned across the counter and spoke quietly.
“Land boundary. The olive grove on the eastern slope — they have argued this particular line since their fathers argued it before them. Matteo will have them drinking together by noon.”
I smiled, picked up my bag, and headed for the stairs.
Behind me, Matteo’s voice carried through the doorway — calm, measured, the same tone he’d used on the parrot couple — and one of the men’s voices dropped almost immediately, like a flame meeting damp air.
I stepped out into the sunlight and stood for a moment at the top of the narrow staircase, the bakery smell rising warm around me, the piazza spreading below between the pale stone houses.
Four minutes to sign for a year of my life.
I had a feeling the paperwork was the easy part.
I left Matteo’s office with a smile and a buff folder rolled up in my handbag. My nature was to read every line, do due diligence, then sign, then go to a quiet corner and read everything again. But the sky was too blue, everyone smiled and said hello using a variety of signs: ciao, a nod, or a smile. I was in a bubble and wanted to stay there.
As I walked, I took in every house, noting the color of their doors, smiling when I realized none were green. I scanned shop windows, cataloguing against the vendor’s name, seeing brands I’d never heard of, designs that somehow looked nicer than New York at a fraction of the price.
I saw a cobbler and stopped.
His workshop was open to the street — no door, just a wide stone arch and the smell of leather and beeswax drifting out like an invitation. The old man inside sat on a low stool, his back slightly curved, working a piece of sole with a curved needle and waxed thread so fine it was almost invisible. Around him, the tools of his trade hung from a pegboard in order of size, each one worn smooth at the handle from decades of the same grip. Shoes in various stages of resurrection lined a shelf above his head: a heel reattached, a seam resewn, a pair of boots that had clearly been written off by someone who didn’t know better.
I recognized the instinct underneath the craft without quite meaning to. Take what is broken. Find what is still sound. Reconstruct the truth of the thing from what remains. I had spent eight years doing exactly that — only with spreadsheets instead of soles, and fraudsters instead of worn leather.
He looked up, caught me staring, and smiled with the unhurried dignity of a man who knew his work was worth watching.
I smiled back and walked on.
I took the long way back, partly because the morning still felt too good to waste and partly because I wasn’t ready to sit with a legal folder and read my own future line by line. The path up to the villa smelled of rosemary and warm stone. Figaro was not on the step when I arrived, which felt like a comment on something.
Valentina was not in the kitchen. The house had its midday quiet — the kind that settles over old buildings like a held breath. I poured myself a glass of water, stood at the kitchen window watching the terraces shimmer, then picked up my bag and went upstairs.
The dressing room.
I’d walked past it twice since Archie delivered my cases, glancing through the door with the polite wariness of someone who suspects the room might be larger than they’re ready for. Now I pushed the door fully open, reached for the light, and stood in the doorway.
It was larger than I was ready for.
Two full walls of fitted wardrobes in dark walnut, floor to ceiling, their doors slightly ajar in the way of things that have stood open for a while and settled into the habit. A long island unit ran down the center, its surface clear except for a wooden jewelry stand, a small mirror on a stand, and a cut-glass bowl holding buttons of varying sizes and colors — the kind of bowl that accumulates over a lifetime of small repairs. The third wall held shelves: hatboxes, shoeboxes stacked in order, a row of handbags arranged by size. The fourth wall was where the pirate’s chest sat, exactly as Agatha had described, its brass fittings catching the light.
I would open that another day. I wasn’t ready for a whole life in photographs yet.
I started with the wardrobes.
My accountant’s instinct surfaced immediately, which I allowed because there was no sky blue enough to suppress it indoors. I began at the left and worked right — opening each section, noting its contents, and assessing its condition. Agatha had dressed well. Not ostentatiously, but with the considered eye of a woman who had learned her own proportions long ago and bought accordingly. Linen shirts in cream and white. Silk blouses in the colors of the estate — olive, terracotta, the deep blue of the sea on a still morning. Dresses that were simple and beautiful in the way that takes considerable money to achieve.
I pulled a few things out. Held them up. Decided against removing anything. Put them back.
An hour passed this way. I had earmarked nothing for donation, and I knew, if I was being honest with myself, that I wasn’t going to. Everything here had been loved. Everything was still sound.
Then I reached the far right section.
It was smaller than the others — a single wardrobe, its door slightly stiffer than the rest. Inside, the clothes were arranged differently: not by color or garment type, but hung together as a distinct collection, separated from the rest by a wooden divider. I flicked through them slowly.
They were almost right for Agatha. Almost. The cut of the shoulders, the length of the sleeves — everything was fractionally off, as though the clothes had been chosen with a different silhouette in mind. A silk blouse in deep teal with buttons like small pearls. A linen dress, the color of fresh cream, with its waist slightly narrow. A lightweight jacket in pale gray, its lapels slightly too neat for Agatha’s easy, lived-in style.
I pulled out the blouse and held it against myself in the small mirror.
It was exactly right for me.
I stood very still for a moment.
Then I pulled out the dress. Held it up. Set it aside on the island. The jacket. Two more blouses, one in ivory, one the color of ripe figs. A pair of wide-legged trousers in soft charcoal linen. Each one wrong for Agatha, each one — in cut, in color, in scale — as though someone had been assembling a wardrobe for a woman who was thirty-four, five feet eight, and hadn’t bought herself anything beautiful in four years.
I checked the labels. A vintage Valentino blouse, its price tag still tucked inside — the original retail price printed in faded ink, four figures, the kind of number that made my accountant’s eye blink. Below it, a small sticker from a thrift store in Milan. Twelve euros. A Marni dress: consignment tag from Rome, forty-five euros. The jacket: Max Mara, barely worn, from a second-hand boutique in Palermo whose name I didn’t recognize. Twenty euros.
Aunt Agatha had hunted for these. Not ordered them from a catalogue, not bought them new — she had walked through thrift shops and consignment stores across Sicily and beyond, pulling things from rails and holding them up and thinking: yes, this is Isla’s.
I sat down on the edge of the island unit and pressed my fingers to my eyes.
I hadn’t cried at the cemetery. Not properly. I’d cried in my bedroom on the first night, for my parents and the distance, for Karl’s headstone growing smaller behind me. But I hadn’t yet cried for Agatha herself — for the woman who had framed a child’s drawing of Lake Michigan and hung it above her dresser, who had kept every letter, who had spent years shopping for a niece she’d never told any of this to.
I cried now.
Not for long. The house had its quiet dignity, and I felt I owed it the same. I found a tissue in my bag, pressed it against my face, and breathed. Through the window, the terraces ran down toward the sea in their patient green rows.
Eventually, I stood, smoothed my hands down the jacket, and decided. Valeria in the village. I would take everything that needed altering, and I would have it done, and I would wear Agatha’s gifts as though they had always been mine, because apparently they always had.
I lifted the jacket to fold it over my arm and felt something in the left pocket.
A note. Small, folded twice.
I opened it.
Of course, you found this. You were always going to count the coats before you tried them on.
The blue silk blouse is yours. I knew it the moment I saw it. Everything that fits — keep it. Take the rest to Valeria in the village. She’s expecting you. It’s all settled.
I never stopped shopping for you, Isla. I just didn’t know your address.
With love, Agatha.
I read it twice. Then I folded it carefully and pressed it into my bag, beside Karl’s watch in its folded cloth.
Two people who had loved me without being asked. One gone four years, one gone before I knew to look for her.
I gathered the clothes over my arm, took one last look at the dressing room — the jewelry stand, the button bowl, the pirate chest waiting patiently against the wall — and went downstairs to find Valentina and ask the way to Valeria’s.
I stood in front of the mirror a moment longer than necessary, repaired my mascara with the precision of a woman who refused to arrive anywhere looking like she’d been crying, and went downstairs.
Valentina took one look at me and headed for the coffee machine. Girls can’t fool girls.
“Your mother called.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes. She wanted to know about flights, collection from the airport, best time to visit.” She paused. “She asked how you were coping.”
“Oh.”
She set the espresso in front of me. I drank it in one go — a caffeine mood swing in a single swallow — and felt my spine return.
“I told her you are happy and that the village already loves you.”
“You didn’t mention—”
“—Yoga pants and running? No, I did not.”
“I’m glad she called.”
“Cell towers were still down, so she did what mothers do when they can’t reach their children.” She smiled at the sink. “She found another way.”
I set down the cup and felt genuinely restored.
“Do we have a car?”
“We have Archie. Where would you like to go?”
“Valeria’s. In the village.”
She turned from the sink.
“Ahh. You were in the closet.”
“Yes.”
“What will you keep?”
“Everything.”
I caught her expression as she turned back — irony, pride, and something warmer underneath both. She said nothing. She didn’t need to.
I made three trips up and down the stairs with suit bags and a case I’d emptied onto the bed, folding Agatha’s clothes into it with more care than I’d given my own. Archie arrived while I was on the second trip — I heard the truck before I saw it — and by the time I came down with the last bag, he was at the door, cap in hand, one of Enzo’s cannoli already claimed from the plate on the counter that I hadn’t noticed arrive.
He waited until I’d finished before he lifted a single finger toward the bags. I had learned quickly not to argue about who carried things.
He loaded the truck with the same easy economy he brought to everything, then held the passenger door.
The road — if road was the right word for it — descended from the villa in a series of convictions rather than curves. Each rut was committed to. Each stone was a personal decision. The truck bucked and dropped and recovered with the cheerful stoicism of a vehicle that had long since made its peace with the terrain, while I gripped the door handle and revised my earlier assessment of Archie’s boat journey as unnecessary. It had been an act of mercy.
After twenty minutes, we reached a drivable track and joined it with a clunk that felt like a full stop. I pointed back the way we’d come, then at the smooth tarmac ahead.
“That road needs work.”
Archie shook his head — not disagreement exactly, more the patient expression of someone setting the record straight.
“Need Medico.”
I looked at him.
He kept his eyes on the road, both hands on the wheel, the unlit cigarette at the corner of his mouth moving slightly as he drove.
Two words. That was all it took. My privilege arrived and departed in the same breath — the reflex assumption that a rough road was a problem to be solved, measured against a village without a doctor. I turned back to the window and watched the coast appear below us, blue and indifferent and entirely unmoved by my recalibration.
The little things mattered here. I was only beginning to understand which ones.
Next Chapter:
Aunt Agatha must have been an amazing woman the clothes she searched for and collected for an absent niece she had no address for now that is true love! Another brilliant chapter in what is rapidly becoming a favourite story among many others of yours 💖💖💖💖💖
Thank you, Kate, another great start to my day. Got me misty eyed again when she realized how much her aunt loved her. I know, wait till she goes through the chest. I am really enjoying this story, as much as your rewrite of Meet Cute. Again you've placed me into the middle of Isla's world.
Enjoy your evening. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️