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PROLOGUE
Sophia Ragusa woke on her sixteenth birthday to the sound of a toucan pooping.
‘Tatu!’ Sophia groaned as she rubbed her eyes, trying to shake off the shadow of sleep. ‘That’s not a nice way to say happy birthday!’
Last year, Sophia had asked her dad for a pet for her birthday. She’d been expecting a kitten, or maybe a Yorkshire Terrier puppy. But when he’d revealed Tatu to her — a toco toucan — she’d instantly fallen in love.
‘It’s the most expensive pet bird that money can buy,’ her father had said. But Sophia hadn’t cared about the money. She’d been too busy getting lost in Tatu’s gorgeous blue eyes.
Sophia swung her legs over the side of her bed and stretched. The morning sunlight was bright and overwhelming. Her birthday was on the summer solstice: June 21st. It was the longest day of the year, and the sun had already been up for hours.
Tatu trilled and squawked from the other part of the suite of rooms she slept in.
‘Coming, buddy,’ Sophia called. She pulled the cord on her blinds, and the sun streamed in through her huge windows. The view was sensational. Her family owned one of Boston’s historic brownstones, right next to the Charles River. She looked across the glinting expanse of water. A flock of birds soared through the sky; inky slips of black against the endless blue.
‘A sunny day, Tatu,’ she said, smiling at her birdy friend. Tatu didn’t smile back. He couldn’t, of course, but Sophia thought that even if he could, he probably wouldn’t. It wasn’t that his cage was small — far from it. Sophia’s father had bought just about the biggest, fanciest cage that money could buy. It took up an entire room of Sophia’s suite. It was just that it felt like the only cage that Tatu would be happy with was the entire world.
He was a good-looking bird — dark plumage shot through with electric yellow. Intelligent, pale-blue eyes, and an enormous clementine-orange bill that was always nudging and pecking at some morsel of food or other.
In the mornings, though, before he had been fed for the day, Tatu always seemed sad. Right now, he was climbing the cage. He moved restlessly up and down the bars, his talons gripping the steel, his little body shifting as he moved.
‘Calm down, baby boy,’ she said soothingly. He did seem to calm down a little when she came in. But he didn’t stop climbing the bars.
To the side of his cage was a little fridge. She opened it and took out some fresh fruit — chunks of watermelon, papaya, a few mouthfuls of strawberry. This was her routine every day, regardless of whether it was her birthday. Her dad had offered to hire someone — a ‘bird woman’ as he kept saying — to look after Tatu, but Sophia had declined. She loved looking after her friend. Plus, what was the point of having a pet if you didn’t get to look after it?
She sliced the fruit into manageable pieces. Toucans don’t chew so it’s important to prepare their food carefully.
‘Here you go, sweetie,’ she said, popping the fruit onto a thin tray then sliding it through the bars. Tatu purred — a funny, rattling noise that he made when he wanted attention — then he started his breakfast.
As she watched him eat, she glanced out of the window again, at another group of birds. Sometimes, when she was feeling low, she got this feeling about Tatu. A feeling that she tried to ignore, that she tried to convince herself she might not be right about.
But deep down, she knew it was true.
It was impossible for a bird like Tatu to be happy in a cage. No matter how pretty the cage was, no matter how doting and loving his jailer. It was simply impossible. He needed to be out there, in the wild, living for himself, not for her.
Sophia heard the door click behind her and she stuffed those feelings deep down again. There was no way that she could release Tatu. If she so much as tried, her Papa would kill her.
‘My darling Sophia!’ It was her father’s deep, heavily-accented voice. Her father, Giovanni Ragusa, had emigrated from Sicily twenty years ago, but hadn’t managed to shake that snaky, colorful twang from his voice. He was standing in the doorway, immaculately dressed. He wore a perfectly cut white suit over a black turtleneck sweater.
He smiled and his teeth flashed. She ran over to him and hugged him close to her. He was a big man. He smelled like he always did — metallic and citrusy.
‘My little princess is finally sixteen! I can’t believe it!’ He kissed her cheek. ‘Happy birthday, darling. Now, come with me. It’s time for presents and… surprises!’
Her birthday was special this year. Sophia’s mom and her brother, Vincenzo, were out of town on a trip. That meant that she’d got her Papa all to herself.
She even had a sneaking suspicion that he’d organized it all for her — all so that the two of them could be together on her special day. He’d pushed her mom and Vinnie to go to an opera in New York. Practically insisted.
‘So,’ her Papa said, as his butler poured a stream of jet-black coffee into his porcelain cup, ‘how does it feel to finally be old enough to get married?’
Sophia laughed. ‘Papa, you’re so funny. As if I’m thinking of marriage today.’
‘You’re not?’ he said. ‘So, what are you thinking of?’
She leaned back in her chair and twirled her dark hair around a finger. ‘I dunno! Life! Everything that’s ahead of me. Finishing school, I guess, and then… college? Maybe?’
Her Papa grinned. A deeply old-fashioned man, she’d had countless arguments with her dad about going to college. Sometimes she felt like he was only joking when he said that girls didn’t need to go to college to learn the important things in life, but other times it felt like he was deathly serious.
‘College, college,’ he said, with a strange tone of voice. ‘You know, back in the old country y—’
