Alice was sure that she could hear those words echoing against the wallpaper in the study, trapped forever in these four walls and inside her head.

"Hola, mi amorcito," said Soledad. She still called her that, even though the pencil-thin girl standing in front of her was a far cry from the sleepy child she used to dress and walk to school every morning.

"Hi," replied Alice.

Soledad looked at her for a few seconds, waiting for her to say something, but Alice glanced away nervously. Soledad returned to her shelves.

"Sol," Alice said at last.

"Yes?"

"I have to ask you something."

Soledad set the books down on the desk and walked over to Alice.

"What is it, mi amorcito?"

"I need a favor."

"What sort of favor? Of course, tell me."

Alice rolled the elastic of her trousers around her index finger.

"On Saturday I have to go to a party. At my friend Viola's house."

"Oh, how lovely," said Soledad, smiling.

"I'd like to bring a dessert. I'd like to make it myself. Would you help me?"

"Of course, darling. What sort of dessert?"

"I don't know. A cake. Or a tiramisu. Or that one that you make with cinnamon."

"My mother's recipe," said Soledad with a hint of pride. "I'll teach you."

Alice looked at her pleadingly.

"So we'll go shopping together on Saturday? Even though it's your day off?"

"Of course, dear," said Soledad. For a moment she felt important, and she recognized in Alice's insecurity the little girl she had raised.

"Could you take me somewhere else as well?" Alice ventured.

"Where?"

Alice hesitated for a moment.

"To get a tattoo," she said hastily.

"Oh, mi amorcito." Soledad sighed, vaguely disappointed. "You know your father doesn't want you to."

"We won't tell him. He'll never see it," Alice insisted with a whine.

Soledad shook her head.

"Come on, Sol, please," she begged. "I can't get it done on my own. I need my parents' permission."

"So what can I do?"

"You can pretend to be my mother. You'll only have to sign a piece of paper, you won't have to say anything."

"But I can't, my dear, I can't. Your father would fire me."

Alice suddenly grew more serious. She looked Soledad straight in the eyes.

"It'll be our secret, Sol." She paused. "After all, the two of us already have a secret, don't we?"

Soledad looked at her, puzzled. At first she didn't understand.

"I know how to keep secrets," Alice continued slowly. She felt as strong and ruthless as Viola. "Otherwise he'd have fired you ages ago."

Soledad was suddenly unable to breathe.

"But-" she said.

"So you'll do it?" Alice cut in.

Soledad looked at the floor.

"Okay," she said quietly. Then she turned her back on Alice and arranged the books on the shelf while her eyes filled with two fat tears.

Mattia deliberately made all his movements as silently as he could. He knew that the chaos of the world would only increase, that the background noise would grow until it covered every coherent signal, but he was convinced that by carefully measuring his every gesture he would be less guilty of that slow ruin.

He had learned to set down first his toe and then his heel, keeping his weight toward the outside of the sole to minimize the amount of surface area in contact with the ground. He had perfected this technique years before, when he would get up in the night and stealthily roam about the house, the skin of his hands having become so dry that the only way to know they were still his was to pass a knife over them. Over time that strange, circumspect gait had become his normal way of walking.

His parents would often find themselves suddenly face-to-face with him, like a hologram projected from the floor, a frown on his face and his mouth always tightly shut. Once his mother dropped a plate with fright. Mattia bent down to pick up the bits, but resisted the temptation of those sharp edges. His mother, embarrassed, thanked him, and when he left she sat on the floor and stayed there for a quarter of an hour, defeated.

Mattia turned the key in the front door. He had learned that by turning the handle toward himself and pressing his palm over the keyhole, he could eliminate almost entirely the metallic click of the lock. With the bandage on it was even easier.

He slipped into the hallway, put the keys back in again, and repeated the operation from inside, like a burglar in his own home.

His father was already home, earlier than usual. When he heard him raise his voice he froze, unsure whether to cross the sitting room and interrupt his parents' conversation or go out again and wait until he saw the living room light go out from the courtyard.

"I don't think it's right," his father concluded with a note of reproach in his voice.

"Right," Adele shot back. "You'd rather pretend nothing is wrong, act as if nothing strange were going on."

"And what's so strange?"

There was a pause. Mattia could picture his mother lowering her head and wrinkling up one corner of her mouth as if to say it's pointless trying to talk with you.

"What's so strange?" she repeated emphatically. "I don't…"

Mattia kept a step back from the ray of light that spilled from the sitting room into the hall. With his eyes he followed the line of shadow from the floor to the walls and then to the ceiling. He realized that it formed a trapezoid, only one more trick of perspective.

His mother often abandoned her sentences halfway through, as if she had forgotten what she was going to say as she was saying it. Those interruptions left bubbles of emptiness in her eyes and in the air and Mattia always imagined bursting them with a finger.

"What's strange is that he stuck a knife in his hand in front of all his classmates. What's strange is that we were convinced those days were over but we were wrong once again," his mother went on.

Mattia had no reaction when he realized that they were talking about him, just a mild sense of guilt at eavesdropping on a conversation he wasn't supposed to hear.

"That's not reason enough to go and talk to his teachers without him," his father said, but in a more moderate tone. "He's old enough to have the right to be there."

"For God's sake, Pietro," his mother exploded. She never called him by name. "That's not the point, don't you understand? Will you stop treating him as if he were-"

She froze. The silence stuck in the air like static electricity. A slight shock made Mattia's back contract.

"As if he were what?"

"Normal," his mother confessed. Her voice trembled slightly and Mattia wondered if she was crying. Then again, she cried often since that afternoon. Most of the time for no reason. Sometimes she cried because the meat she had cooked was stringy or because the plants on the balcony were full of parasites. Whatever the reason, her despair was always the same. As if, in any case, there were nothing to be done.

"His teachers say he has no friends. He only talks to the boy who sits next to him and he spends the whole day with him. Boys his age go out in the evening, try to hook up with girls-"

"You don't think he's…" his father interrupted. "Well, you know…"

Mattia tried to complete the sentence, but nothing came to mind.

"No, that's not what I think. Maybe I wish that's all it was," said his mother. "Sometimes I think that something of Michela ended up in him."

His father let out a deep, loud sigh.

"You promised not to talk about that anymore," he said, vaguely irritated.

Mattia thought of Michela, who had disappeared into thin air. But only for a fraction of a second. Then he let himself be distracted by the faint image of his parents, who, he discovered, were reflected in miniature on the smooth, curved surfaces of the umbrella stand. He started scratching his left elbow with his keys. He felt the joint twitching from one tooth to the next.