Live-In
Ileana Rusu has looked after Captain Ettore Bellandi for nine months. She cooks for him, washes him, sleeps in a converted pantry off the kitchen and gets up whenever he coughs. Her pay comes in an envelope. Her contract is always a matter of days.
One Monday morning in February she finds him dead.
By the evening his son has discovered that their mother’s pearls are missing. By Wednesday the carabinieri have a recording from the camera in the corridor, and a question Ileana will not answer: why, on the night the Captain died, was she out on the terrace for two hours and four minutes?
His daughter Giulia, a lawyer in Milan, wants the house closed by Sunday. She has spent her working life reading documents for the sentence built round a hole. Now she will have to read her father’s.
Set over one week in a village above the Ligurian sea, and the nine months that led to it, Live-In is a quiet, piercing novel about the women who care for other people’s parents, the children they leave at home, and what is really owed, on paper and off it.
Ebook in all major stores. Paperback and Amazon edition: December 2026.
Read the opening
Ileana wakes a minute before the alarm, as she has every morning for nine months, and lies still, listening to the house.
It is an old house, and it talks. The pipes tick as the boiler wakes. A shutter shifts on its hook. Down in the bay the wind gathers itself and comes up the hill, and finds the gap under the terrace door, and breathes along the corridor in one long, thin note. She knows all of it by now, the way she once knew the sound of thirty children settling into their chairs.
Her room is the smallest in the house, a pantry that somebody converted for a maid, in a century when houses like this still had maids. It holds a bed, a chair, a hook for her coat and a window onto the bins. Above the pillow she has pinned her mother’s embroidered towel, red thread on white linen, so that anyone who opened the door would see that a person lives here.
Nobody opens the door. She does not mind.
She is listening for the other sound, the one that matters: the cough, the creak of the bedsprings, the rubber foot of the cane finding the tiles. At six in the morning Ettore is generally awake and has opinions about the weather.
There is nothing.
He is sleeping late, she decides. It happens. He is eighty-four and his nights are long. She puts her cardigan on over her nightdress and goes through to the kitchen without turning on the light.
The window over the sink is the colour of dishwater, and the hill beyond it is only a darker shape against the dark. People who have never been here think of the Riviera in February as a postcard with the sun left out. It is not. It is damp and quiet, and it smells of woodsmoke and wet stone and, underneath, always, of the sea. The tourists have gone. The lemon trees on the terrace are wrapped in fleece, like invalids. In a fortnight the mimosa will break out on the hillside above the village, all at once, a yellow so loud that old men stop their cars to look at it. Ettore says it happens every year and every year it is a scandal.
She fills the moka and sets it on the ring. While it begins to mutter she makes up the tray, because her hands know how.
The cup with the chipped rim, which he will not let her replace. Barley coffee from the flask she filled last night, since the doctor forbade the real thing in the spring, which Ettore calls, with deep contempt, ‘the brown water’. Two dry biscuits on a saucer. The blue plastic pill box with the days of the week in Italian, open at LUNEDÌ: white, white, small yellow, large white. In nine months she has not once got them wrong. She has not once been thanked for it, either, and she has not minded. She taught mathematics for sixteen years, and a teacher learns not to expect thanks for the things that go right.
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