The paint samples arrived on a Tuesday, which was the most ordinary thing about that week.
Jia had spread them across the kitchen table of the chalet like a hand of cards she didn’t know how to play. Ivory Coast. Linen Wash. Warm Alabaster. She held one up to the window and the morning light off Lake Como made it look almost gold, which was not what anyone had asked for. The chalet needed selling, not gold. It needed neutral walls and a functioning boiler and the cracked terrace tiles replaced before the estate agent came in six weeks. That was the arrangement. That was all it was.
She heard the front door open.
Massimo had been staying in the smaller bedroom at the far end of the hall since the first day — the room with the sloped ceiling he had to duck under every morning, which Jia knew because she’d heard the muffled curse at seven a.m. two days running. He came into the kitchen in paint-spattered work trousers and a grey shirt with the sleeves already rolled up, carrying a takeaway bag from the bakery at the bottom of the village road. He set it on the counter without ceremony. Two espressos in paper cups. A pastry wrapped in wax paper that he slid toward her without looking at her.
“The tiles came,” he said. “They left them by the gate.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
She nodded and looked back at her paint samples. He took his espresso and went outside to the terrace.
This was how their mornings went. Efficient. Practical. Two people managing a shared problem.
The chalet had belonged to Massimo’s uncle, who had also been Jia’s former employer at a small international logistics firm in Milan. When Renato died in February, he’d left the property jointly to his nephew and to Jia, his longest-serving project manager, with a note that read, in Renato’s characteristically blunt handwriting: “You two will figure it out. You always did.” Neither of them had known the other was named in the will. Neither of them had particularly wanted to know.
They’d met three years ago over a conference table in Milan, argued about a shipping contract for forty minutes, and arrived at a solution that was mostly Jia’s. Massimo had acknowledged this by buying her a coffee afterward and saying almost nothing for twenty minutes, which she’d found either respectful or insufferable depending on her mood. They’d worked in proximity for two years after that. Professionally cordial. Occasionally sharp with each other in the way people get when they’re both right about different things.
And now this. Six weeks. A chalet that smelled of old timber and lavender and someone else’s life.
The first sharp moment came on the fourth day.
Jia was on the stepladder in the main room, cutting in the ceiling line with a brush, when the ladder shifted on the uneven stone floor. She grabbed the window frame. The paint tin swayed. She didn’t fall — she caught herself — but Massimo was across the room in three steps with both hands on the sides of the ladder before she’d fully registered what had happened. His face, when she looked down at it, was unguarded in a way she hadn’t seen before. Not alarmed exactly. Something quieter than alarm.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“I know.” He didn’t move his hands.
She climbed down. He stepped back. They didn’t mention it.
But that evening, when they were eating on the terrace with the lake going copper in the late light, she noticed he’d moved the stepladder into the corner and replaced it with the taller, sturdier one from the storage shed. He said nothing about it. She said nothing about it. The lake was very still.
Renato’s sister, Giulia, arrived on the ninth day with a car full of casserole dishes and opinions.
She was seventy-three, drove fast, and had an opinion about every wall color Jia had chosen. But she also brought wine from a vineyard on the hill above Varenna and sat with them on the terrace after dinner, talking about Renato with a warmth that made the chalet feel less like a transaction and more like something that had once been loved. Giulia told the story of Renato buying the place in the 1980s with money he’d borrowed from three different cousins and the absolute certainty that it would all work out.
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