The Third Offer
He has been alone since he was twenty-three. The visitor knows exactly what that cost.
Castelfonte has four hundred and eleven people, an average age of sixty-three, and four children under ten. The school closed in 2019. Don Elio Bartoli has been its priest since 1981 and has buried three hundred and six of them.
In February a man buys a ruin for one euro and moves in, which nobody does in February. He comes to Mass and does not pretend to believe. He knows what Don Elio prayed for in a hospital corridor in 1994. And he never lies - not once.
His first offer is eleven million euros and a future for the village, and it is real, and Don Elio takes it.
His second is to be remembered. Not falsely - a true record of forty-one years that nobody has ever counted.
And his third is eleven weeks of the summer of 1979, and a girl in a doorway he never spoke to, and everything else left exactly as it is.
There is no sin in it. That is the difficulty.
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