Part One: The Weight of Everything Money Could Buy
The villa had fourteen rooms, which Daniel Avery had never counted himself but knew from the architectural plans his assistant had filed somewhere in the organized labyrinth of his office. He lived in perhaps four of them with any regularity — the bedroom, the study, the kitchen in the mornings, the terrace in the evenings when the city below arranged itself into something that looked, from sufficient distance, like order. The rest of the rooms existed in the particular way that expensive things exist when they are owned rather than used: perfectly maintained, impeccably furnished, waiting.
