I noticed the missing mirrors before I noticed my best friend was disappearing.

The villa had none. I saw it on the walk from the boat dock, dragging my suitcase over cobblestone while Saskia's future mother-in-law smiled at me from the terrace above. Every room I passed had the same careful absence. Hooks where mirrors should hang. Clean rectangles on wallpaper where frames had been removed. Not recently. Years ago.

I'd been paying attention before I even landed.

Saskia had skipped the bachelorette party. Not rescheduled — skipped, with a phone call that lasted four minutes and an apology so vague it left no surface to push against. I'd planned it for three months: Rome, two nights, a private tour, a rooftop bar that required favors to book. She said she wasn't feeling up to it. That's not a sentence Saskia uses. When Saskia bails, she sends flowers to your office with a handwritten card that's funny and specific and slightly unhinged. She doesn't say she isn't feeling up to things. She felt up to everything.

Then there was the location. She'd kept the villa secret until three weeks before the wedding. I'm her maid of honor. I needed to book flights. When I finally pushed, she'd laughed it off and sent me a link without explanation, warm and casual and impossible to argue with. The Saskia I'd known for thirteen years would have sent me the address the day Marco proposed. She would have already made me look at photos.

And she'd been harder to reach. Messages read and not answered until the next morning. Evening calls going to voicemail. Nothing alarming in isolation. Everything alarming in aggregate.

I told myself it was the distance. The family. The sheer weight of marrying into something old and foreign and Italian.

I told myself that on the flight. I told myself that on the boat. I told myself it right up until I saw her running across the courtyard in bare feet and a white linen dress, and breathed her in — same perfume, same laugh, same warmth — and felt the telling stop working.

Same Saskia. Almost.

"You look incredible," I said. "Very Italian bride."

"Wait until you see the courtyard at night. They light a thousand candles. A thousand, Val. I counted."

She said it with delight. The thing is: Saskia doesn't count things. She experiences them. She would have said a thousand candles because she meant something vast and warm and flickering — not because she'd walked the perimeter tallying wicks. The woman who once guessed there were "maybe forty" people at her own birthday party of two hundred did not count candles.

Small wrong thing. I held it somewhere behind my sternum and kept smiling.

The villa was old money made permanent. Walls thick enough to outlast everything, bougainvillea climbing the south face in cascades of violent pink, a terrace overlooking a sea so blue it looked like an argument about color. Beautiful the way old things are beautiful — with the full knowledge that beauty was never the point.

My room was on the second floor, facing the cliff. King bed, fresh flowers, a balcony that opened over forty feet of Mediterranean air. No mirror in the bathroom. A small landscape painting hung where one should have been — olives and pale light and nothing that showed you back to yourself.

I unpacked quickly. Phone on the charger first. Toiletries out of the bag. A dress on the back of the door for dinner. I stood at the balcony rail for a moment, one hand on the warm stone, and let the salt wind move over me.

Beautiful. I didn't trust it.

My phone showed one bar of signal. Then zero.

Dinner was at ten. I'd never eaten dinner at ten in my life, but this was Italy, and Saskia had told me the family kept late hours — "European hours," she'd said, as though that explained anything.

The dining room was candlelit and long. Forty guests, maybe. The Santarossa family occupied the head of the table like they'd been placed there centuries ago and no one had thought to rearrange them. Marco, the groom, was handsome in a way that felt deliberate — warm smile, attentive hands that found Saskia's shoulder, her waist, the back of her neck, moving between these places with the ease of someone charting familiar territory. Gianna, his mother, presided with the grace of a woman for whom hospitality has calcified into instinct.

None of them ate.

I watched Marco lift his fork three times and set it down without bringing it to his mouth. I watched Gianna sip wine but never reach for bread. I watched a young man across the table push food around his plate with the defeated focus of someone who has to look occupied.

Then I looked at Saskia's wine.

It was darker than mine. Not dramatically — a shade, the way one shadow differs from another at dusk. But the difference was there. I lifted her glass and smelled it. Earthy, with something sweet underneath that didn't belong to any wine I could name.

I poured her water and said something about the boat ride making me thirsty. She laughed and took the water. I set her glass beside my own and didn't drink from either.

Across the table, a man watched me do it.

Not Marco. Not the nervous young man. Someone I hadn't been introduced to. Dark hair, gray-green eyes the candlelight had aged past the rest of him. He sat perfectly still — not the stillness of someone at ease, but the stillness of something that had decided not to move. He looked at the two wine glasses beside my plate. Then at me. He did not look away.

I looked away first. I told myself it was the jet lag.

After dinner I walked to my room. I was unlocking my door when I felt him behind me. Not heard — felt. A drop in temperature, specific and sudden, like a door open somewhere to a room that had been cold for a very long time.

"You noticed the wine."

I turned. The man from dinner stood in the corridor, close enough that I could see the gray in his eyes wasn't gray at all. It was green gone cold. Sea glass left too long in shadow.

"Who are you?"

"Adrian. Marco's brother." A pause that lasted one beat past comfortable. "Don't drink it tomorrow. And don't let Saskia drink it alone."

He was gone before I finished inhaling. The corridor stood empty, the air still cold where he'd been.

I went inside. Locked the door. Sat on the bed.

Then I took out my phone and started writing down the list I'd been building since before I left home.

Things that don't add up.

I'd been composing it for weeks. I just hadn't written it down yet.