Tommy fought the urge to jump from the car and run all the way home. Kate would murder him, of course, and hisgrandparents—who awaited theirarrival—would be less than pleased. The fact that he’d sold his childhood home and given up the apartment he and Kate had shared in Boston would also be a problem. They’d put the Mediterranean Sea and thousands of miles of Atlantic Ocean between themselves and everything they knew to start this new adventure together in Sicily.

This was home now.

The tiny Fiat wound its way up through the narrow streets of Becchina. The engine whined in protest at having to pull the small trailer up the twisty road that was the heart of this hill town.

“Hey,” Kate said, reaching over to put a hand on his thigh. “It’s going to be perfect.”

“Your Tommy-sense kicking in again?”

“I don’t need superpowers. You think I can’t just look at you and see how tense you are?” Kate took his right hand off the wheel and kissed his knuckles. “I told you. It’s going to be perfect. Trust me.”

She squeezed his hand to ground him, let him know she was with him all the way.

Tommy pulled back his hand. “I need both to steer. Last thing I want to do is crash into one of these old buildings. Not the first impression I want to make on the locals.”

Kate scoffed. “It wouldn’t exactly be your first impression. You’re like royalty around here.”

“That’s a slight exaggeration.”

“Is it, though?”

She was overstating a bit, but it was true he wasn’t exactly a stranger to Becchina. The population had dwindled over the past few decades, but many of the people had met him before. He had been here five times in his twenty-eight years, visiting his grandparents first with his mom and dad, and later just with his mother. Then, four months ago, he had come to Becchina with Kate, and that had changed everything.

In many ways, it had become a ghost town. There were many of them inSicily—places too distant from the island’s coast or from the few business hubs, places abandoned by the young in favor of Palermo, or more likely Rome or Milan on the mainland. The more adventurous departed for other European nations or for the United States. Some of the hill towns in the vast island’s interior managed to use tourism to keep their communities alive, if not exactly vibrant, but Becchina didn’t have the castles of Erice, or the cathedral of Monreale. It didn’t have fifth-century temples with a view of the Mediterranean like Agrigento.

Becchina did have a few things going for it. An ancient set of stone steps wove down through thetown—two hundred twenty-seven steps, more than the famous stairs in Ragusa. The town also boasted a church with a blue neoclassical dome older than the one on the basilica in Ragusa, but church and dome were both in desperate need of restoration. The town had breathtaking views of the valley and quiet streets that were clean and colorful. Yet somehow it had never made it onto the radar of the travel sites.

A forty-minute drive from the volcanic Mount Etna, Becchina should have been alive.

Instead, it was the corpse of a town that didn’t even realize it was already dead.

The mayor, Fausto Brancati, had seen other towns take drastic measures and had followed their lead. Becchina needed new blood, and it no longer mattered where that blood originated. At Mayor Brancati’s instruction, the town seized abandoned homes and offered them for sale for a single euro, with certain strings attached. The buyer had to live in the home for at least five years and had to spend a minimum of fifty thousand euros on renovations. They were trying to lure people with a sense of adventure and romance, people who might stay beyond the five years, who might have children in Becchina and raise them here, although in his heart, Bra