'Not many,' Piero conceded.

'That's what I thought.' He glanced at the sleeping Julia. 'Has she told you anything about herself?'

'No, but why should she? Our kind respect each other's privacy. You know that.'

'Yes, but there's something about her that worries me. It could be risky to leave her too much alone.'

'But suppose she wants to be left alone?'

'I think she does,' Vincenzo mused, remembering the desperation with which she had cried, 'I don't need anyone's help.'

Nobody said it like that unless their need for help was terrible.

All his life he'd had an instinctive affinity with need creatures. When his father had bought him a puppy he'd chosen the runt of the litter, the one who had held back timidly. His father had been displeased, but the boy, stubborn beneath his quiet manner, had said, 'This one,' and refused to budge.

After that there had been his sister, his twin, discounted by their parents as a mere girl, and therefore loved by him the more. They had been close all their lives until she had cruelly repaid his devotion by dying, and leaving him bereft.

He had loved a woman, refusing to see her grasping nature, until she'd callously abandoned him.

Now he would have said that his days of opening his heart to people were over. No man could afford to be like that, and he'd developed armour in self-defence.

He made an exception for Piero, whom he'd known in better days. There was something about the old man's gentle madness, his humour in the face of misfortune, that called to him despite his resolutions.

As for the awkward, half-hostile woman he'd found sleeping here, he couldn't imagine why he'd allowed her to stay. Perhaps because she wanted nothing from him, and seemed consumed by a bitterness that matched his own.