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Well. Before Stollo took off. Pietro didn’t really have other appointments.
“I’m afraid you look on me as a charity case,” he said lightly over dinner one night.
Stollo swallowed a big bite of fish and showed disbelief. “How so?”
Pietro made a vague gesture toward his own body. “You worry that I am pitiful and lonely, with no other friends, and so you kindly spend half your days with me, ensuring that I am occupied.” He forked up a slice of meat. “And fed.”
Stollo laughed heartily. “I think of you as a man who could make friends anywhere he wanted,” he answered. “For some reason, right now, you have decided not to. And for some reason, right now, you have decided my company is safe. I’m honored to be the one you’ve chosen as a friend.”
The meat still speared on his fork, Pietro stared at Stollo for a long moment. “How odd,” he said at last.
“That I enjoy your company? You’re educated and articulate, interested in everything, knowledgeable about many things, insightful and humorous. Who wouldn’t enjoy conversations with such a man?”
Pietro chewed his food while he thought that over. “No,” he said at last. “How odd that you have so exactly described a state I was not even aware of being in. Deliberately closed off from most of my fellow men. When that is not my natural state.”
Stollo took a sip from his beer and eyed Pietro over the rim, clearly trying to decide whether or not to say something. “I have always thought,” he said at last, “you had a reason for coming back to Corcannon. But it wasn’t a reason you liked.”
Pietro considered that, too. “I left so abruptly,” he said. “I wanted to see what had changed while I was away.” Stollo waited silently, so Pietro sighed and went on. “There’s more to it, of course. But unfortunately, I don’t think I can talk about it.”
“I mean, I know you were in love with someone. And you feel like he betrayed you.”
Pietro flinched back, but Stollo kept his gaze steady. “True on both counts,” Pietro said. “But it wasn’t just that he betrayed me. It’s that he did something—unforgivable. And not to me.”
“Are you going to see him while you’re here? Is that why you came back? To tell him what you think of him?”
“Oh, he knows what I think of him.”
“That didn’t answer the question.”
Pietro took a taste of his wine. “I don’t want to see him,” he said. “I admit—now and then—I’ve placed myself in venues where he might—it’s possible he could have seen me, or someone who knew me once might see me and report back to him—”
“The temple.”
Pietro caught his breath. “What?”
“You were a priest. Obviously.”
Pietro managed a long, slow exhalation. “How long have you suspected that?”
“From the minute I met you.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
Stollo shrugged. “It was pretty clear you didn’t want to talk about it. I don’t care what you did with your life before. We all have a past, and lots of us are trying to leave that past behind.”
“Though the past is like a shadow,” Pietro said. “It’s always attached to you.”
“So what brought you back to the city?” Stollo asked again.
“I was in Oraki. And there was a quake. A small one, but I could feel the ground shudder beneath my feet. And it frightened me.”
Stollo nodded. “There have been more quakes in the past few months than I can ever remember before.”
“Ten years ago,” Pietro said. “That’s the last time they were so frequent. And so strong.”
“So?”
Pietro drained the last of his wine in two long swallows. “So that’s why I came back.”
