Athena and the Grand Reveal

"Athena doesn't need a grand reveal," Amer said. He did not say: It's a hustle, it's a scam. He said: "She's the real deal."

"The problem," Robin said, "is, a, you can't do it, and, b, you don't get it."

"I expected more from the house, after all that," Amer said. From Minori, a sleepy fishing village about twenty miles up the bay, they'd hitched a ride on a donkey cart and rattled around in the back with a couple of crates of knobbled lemons. When they'd spotted the black gate and the giant sandstone urns, they'd hopped off and below a tangle of vines, found a worn marble plaque etched in gold: la rondinaia. They'd climbed 324 narrow steps between tall rows of cypresses and this was the house: a simple, single-story, stucco thing. If it was old, Amer couldn't tell. "They must have pots of money," he said. "With her at the Getty and him in finance. I expected an infinity pool."

"Maybe it's on the other side," Robin said.

Robin rang a rope bell. The third time it clanged, a woman answered. It wasn't Marion. She was thin with a face like a puppet and short, brassy hair. She didn't look at them when she beckoned them in. "Mr. and Mrs. will be here by dinner," she said in Italian. "Lunch will be on the terrace. You are in here." She showed them to a room with arched windows, a wrought iron bed, an elephant foot coffee table, a pair of ostrich egg lamps, a mahogany chest of drawers, and prints of maps on the wall.

"We get this right," Robin said, unpacking his neatly folded shirts and arranging them in the drawers, "we pay off the mortgage, we get the house back."

I get the house back, Amer thought.

It was almost noon when they went looking for the terrace—through a dark, tiled hallway with framed black-and-white photographs and dusty oil portraits from the floor up to the high ceiling. It turned unexpectedly into a staircase and then back again into a hallway. They followed it and emerged suddenly on a veranda and a table set for two under an arbor of grapes, wisteria, and bougainvillea. Beyond it, the giant bay glittered and in a corner of it Stromboli sparked and spluttered. The water strobed with light. A few steps led down to a second terrace with groves of lemons on either side. The air was steely with their fragrance.

Amer turned back and the house surprised him—three stories and a colonnaded portico, chestnut and olive trees, and those arched windows with decorative grilles.

The old redhead called them for lunch—cold cuts, hard cheeses, and a bunch of tiny black grapes that tasted like wild strawberries. Afterward, Robin prepared—walked back and forth across the terra-cotta tiles and practiced his routine on himself. "The Polaroids are good enough on their own," Amer said. "Athena doesn't need your spiel. She deserves better."

"Better is, I go the extra mile," Robin said, without turning.

"Better is, you grow a heart," Amer said into his closed hand.

Amer found a pile of Architectural Digest in their bedroom and flicked through those. But every few pages he turned, he thought he saw Athena—on a shadowy Savannah porch, by a pool at a South Beach condo, in the topiary maze at Chatsworth House. And when he wandered around the grounds afterward, she was there, too—the gleam of her upturned heel among the ferns and gargoyles that ornamented a waterfall and the sharp edges of her upward glance in the thickly flowering jasmine bushes.

"The house is full of surprises," he said to Robin when he came back round to the terrace. Robin was still pacing, still moving his lips soundlessly. "This means a lot to me," Amer said. Robin shook his head at Amer, didn't look. "Just show Marion the pictures and let her make her mind up. No story needed."

"There's always...