Liam turned in a slow circle. He imagined Capri Cavanni, in the last years of her life, sitting in this very room. Not as a glamorous star, but as an old woman with papery skin and watery eyes. He imagined her lighting a cigarette, picking up a letter at random, and reading the words of someone who had loved her from afar. Someone who had built a fantasy around her face.
My dearest Capri, it read. They tell me I am a fool to keep writing. They tell me you are a myth, a face on a screen. But I saw you that night at the Riviera, and I know you are real. You looked at me. You saw me. I will wait on the balcony of the Grand Hotel until the day you come down to the sea. capri cavanni room
The room was a circular turret space, its walls not painted but gilded with fading frescoes of leaping harlequins and crescent moons. A four-poster bed dominated the center, its velvet canopy the color of dried blood. But it was the far wall that stole his breath. It was entirely made of glass—a massive, curving window that faced the sea. Beyond it, the sun was beginning to set, setting the Tyrrhenian Sea on fire. Liam turned in a slow circle
Liam closed the journal. The sun had dipped below the horizon, and the room was now filled with a deep, velvet twilight. Outside, the sea sighed against the cliffs. He imagined her lighting a cigarette, picking up
Capri Cavanni had been a legend of the silent film era, a star whose dark, kohl-rimmed eyes had launched a thousand ships and shattered a dozen studios’ propriety rules. She’d retired here, to this crumbling cliffside villa on the Amalfi Coast, in 1929. And then, according to the sparse records, she’d simply evaporated. No interviews. No photos. Just fifty years of silence until her death at ninety-seven, leaving behind a labyrinthine house and a single instruction: Don’t sell the room.
He walked past her into the hall.