I stayed in Mestre after the servant's visit. I could not move. Could not eat. Could not weep. The grief was a stone in my chest, heavy and cold, and I carried it back to Venice when I finally returned decades later, in 1420.

  By then, the men who had murdered him were gone—withered old men who had either succumbed to old age or been carried off by the pox, their consciences unburdened by what they had done. I walked past their palaces, their tombs, their empty names etched into marble, and felt nothing. No satisfaction. No closure. Just the same hollow ache I had carried across the lagoon all those years ago.

  I walked through the streets like a ghost, past the palaces and the canals, past the spot where they found his body. Someone had left a single white rose there, floating in the water. I watched it drift away on the current.

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  I visited the orphanage he had funded. The children were still there, still fed, still cared for—his final arrangements had ensured it. They asked me if I knew him. I said I did. They asked me to tell them a story about him.

  I told them about the man who gave coin to beggars from his gondola. I told them about the man who softened only in the dark, when the masks came off and he could be himself. I told them about the man who loved a woman so much he sent her away to save her, knowing he would never see her again.

  Before I left Venice, I retrieved something from the palazzo—smuggled out by the same loyal servant who had helped me escape decades earlier, now an old withered, bedridden man in his 70s. He had kept it hidden all those years, waiting for the day I might return. It was a small velvet pouch containing a ring he had worn, the seal of the Council of Ten, and a letter he had written to me in the days before his arrest, knowing what was coming.