Chapter Twenty Rory

I’m back in the Roma Suite—a place that’s starting to feel like the inside of a nightmare. My eyes skitter around the space that now seems confoundingly small, my shakerato glass miraculously cleared, along with the condensation on my nightstand it left behind. Marco’s done efficient work, but I wonder if he also removed some of the air in the place. As I pace around, contemplating this bizarre train trip, I feel suffocated. Everything is gold and crystal and lacquered wood, every fabric luxe brocade, and yet it feels like around every gold curvature, every brocade bend, is a new betrayal. A boulder barreling toward me. And there’s no way out. What could possibly be next?

The boulder flattening me, turning me to dust, that’s what. Nope—not sticking around for that.

A tap on the door, pressing pause on my thoughts. I open it, and there’s Gabriele, his lips quirking in a tiny, sheepish smile, like I’ve caught him in a walk of shame.

“Mi dispiace tanto. Thank God you found her.” He enters cautiously and throws a hand through his thick dark hair. “I’m so sorry, Rory. This daughter of mine, she’s—”

I wave a hand. “It’s fine. Seriously, Gabriele, it’s totally fine. These things happen.”

He grimaces. “With her, it happens too often. In Rome, though, she knows not to go past the Tiber and to come home before dark. This time it’s not okay. What if the train had left without her? What if she’d been kidnapped, dio non voglia.” His eyes fritter around. “Is she hiding? Where is she anyway? Chiara!”

I motion toward the bathroom. “She’s toweling off. A fire ant got into her shirt. Stung her all over. I’ve been bitten by them before and it’s pretty horrible.”

“A fire ant? Oh. Formica di fuoco. They are beasts.”

“Beasts. Really did a number on her chest. She’s going to be itchy for a few days. I had Neosporin, but she may need steroid cream, too.”

Gabriele nods. “Thank you. There’s a doctor on board. I’ll take her. She’s so lucky you were there.”

“Oh, I don’t know. That girl of yours is capable. She took off running. If I wasn’t following her, she would have found some stranger to let her use their shower. She’s strong. Resourceful.”

I smile, a bit sadly, because I recognize that. No fault of Gabriele’s, but a girl who grows up without a mother—no matter how fantastic her father—has to learn to mother herself.

I sit at the banquette, trying to keep the smile on my face but unable to stop the loop in my head of what Chiara told me before she was attacked by the fire ant.

Gabriele goes to the bathroom and knocks on the door. There follows a steady stream of Italian—nothing I understand, but starting fiery on both sides, and then ending with Gabriele on his second walk of shame to join me at the table.

“Is she okay?”

He nods, sighs. Rubs his stubble.

“Are you okay?”

He exhales a heavy breath. “She’s so wonderful, you know? But sometimes I feel like I’m… il giocoliere.…” He extends his arms and turns his palms up, facing the sky, then paddles them like he’s tossing imaginary balls.

“A juggler?”

“A juggler.” He smiles, but I can see it’s an effort.

“Well, I think you’re doing an incredible job. She’s a special kid.”

“She is.” He half smiles. “You know, she regularly invites people over to dinner—the butcher, a docent at the museum—and then lets me know when they’ll be coming. Sometimes only an hour before.”

A giggle shoots out of me.

His smile fades. “And what about you? How’s the trip? This is supposed to be about you, with Chiara and me in the background, but we’ve got it all switched around today.”

“The trip is amazing,” I reassure him, trying to smile, but my lips no longer feel like complying. “I mean, it’s amazing, yes, I’m grateful. But it’s also crazy and, honestly, awful. And I’m starting to get angry. Like, this feels like a setup.”

“A setup? Ulterior motives, you mean?”

“Yes. Maybe. Today we all brought our books to the beach in Monterosso, and they were stolen from our chairs.”

“Your books? You mean, The Cabin on the Lake?”

“Yes! Stolen. Caroline did it. Took them, I mean. I saw a copy in her bag when we got back. She denied it, but—”

“Your friend Caroline?” He arches an incredulous eyebrow. “But why would she—Oh.”

That oh speaks volumes, answers a question I’ve been chewing on. So he knows about the contents of Ginevra’s letter. I’m not sure if I’m angry about that, that he’s responsible, in part, for this smoke and mirrors trip, or comforted that I’m not facing it alone. Both, I guess. “It’s true then? What Ginevra is accusing Caro of?”

He shrugs. “I know as much as you do. The embezzling. But still, why would Caroline steal the books?”

“Ginevra must have put stuff in the book about what Caro’s been up to. And she saw and didn’t want me to find out.” I don’t say the additional rationale I’ve just deduced—that if there’s something between her and Nate, she also could be worried the affair lives in the pages of the book. The affair. God. Maybe it does. Maybe that’s what I missed. Everything feels so unwieldy, like a tangled necklace I’ll never manage to unpick. I need to read that book again.

“I see.” Gabriele’s brow furrows. “But she knows you’ll get another copy. I can get another for you easy, when we’re off the train. And taking them doesn’t stop the book’s publication, or you eventually reading it. So it’s very weird. Maybe it was a fan who took the books. Ginevra has a lot of them, you know. Many quite strange.”

“I saw it in Caro’s bag,” I say harshly. “I know what I saw.”

“Okay.” He’s quiet. But I don’t know if he believes me.

I think whether to mention the boulder, and my finicky doubt as to whether it was actually a fluke accident, but I wonder if I’m starting to sound crazy. I don’t want Gabriele to think I’m losing it. So instead, I opt for, “Hey, do you know why Ginevra wants me to go to Le Sirenuse when we get to Positano?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me all her plans. But…”

“What?” His face scrunches, like he’s trying to decide whether to tell me something. “Please. Please tell me whatever it is.”

“I truly don’t know anything about Le Sirenuse. But Ginevra’s sister lives in Positano. Her name is—”

“Orsola.” I remember vaguely, the few times that Ginevra mentioned her. Ginevra’s twin.

Gabriele shrugs. “I don’t know if that has anything to do with it.”

“I see.”

Ginevra’s twin sister lives in Positano. What in the world could that have to do with anything? I consider telling Gabriele that I’m planning to go see Ginevra tomorrow when we stop in Rome, that I am speculating—spinning out, maybe—that she could have been involved with the adoption I recently discovered. But something stops me. I trust Gabriele, as much as I trust anyone right now, I suppose. But I need to take back control of this trip. And somehow, I feel he knows more than he’s letting on.

“And Nate? What’s going on with him? Are you back together?” Gabriele smiles pleasantly, a smile that I can’t see behind to decipher what he’s getting at. If he’s asking casually, or if he cares about the answer for more selfish reasons.

“Back together? No.” A memory flashes—early on when Nate and I were together, after we met in Ann Arbor. I took him to meet Papa, who had an old Grand Marquis at the time. Like a long cop car. It was so smudgy and dirty and Nate offered to clean it. Papa insisted on helping then, and I remember the two of them now out on the driveway, dipping into the soapy bucket, laughing, cleaning Papa’s car.

“He wants to be back together,” I tell Gabriele, “or he says he does. But—” The thing Chiara told me, about Nate and Caro in Dubai, is still ricocheting through my brain. They couldn’t have slept together. They wouldn’t.

But something is flaring in me that says maybe they did. I’m not ready to talk about it yet. Not aloud. Not with Gabriele.

I need to be alone. To think. My head is pounding—all the conflicting thoughts. Young Nate, with a healthy Papa, when life was simple. Nate and Caro, kissing each other on a movie screen hosted by my spiraling mind.

“I’m really tired,” I finally say with a small, apologetic smile. “I think I need to rest a bit before dinner.”

“Yes.” Gabriele nods. “Chiara—andiamo!”

As they filter out, there are more apologies from Gabriele, and Chiara requesting that I set up a meeting between her and Max, declining to say about what, only that she wants to talk about how she and Max can help each other. I promise to try to arrange a meeting. As she leaves, Chiara says, “Tomorrow would suit me.”

“She’s a star,” I tell Gabriele as we hover in the doorway.

“That’s one word for it.” But he smiles. Then he surprises me by pulling me into a tight hug.

I’d forgotten—his spicy orange scent that feels like it harks from another era, his arms that encircle me tightly. He runs his thumb over my back assuredly, communicating he needs not a thing from me. Just giving. Just having enough to give, without depleting his own stores.

We slept together one time. It was first sex, so you’d think fumbling and nervous laughter. Tentative unbuttoning. But it was hot. Not earth-shattering necessarily, although I’m old enough to know that sex can ebb and flow and change. The way he held me, though—that was the earth-shattering part. Nate is a great cuddler, but we both gravitated toward our separate sides for sleep. It was like that since the beginning, and I thought I was good with it, that I needed space, that I wasn’t the type to conjoin in bed. But Gabriele, he just held me. Not tightly, squeezing the life out of me. Softly. So softly and nicely that I heard myself humming throughout the night—like a thousand mini-orgasms but all felt in my heart, appreciating how nice and homey and right it felt.

I realize all of a sudden that I’ve been hugging Gabriele for a very long time. I let him go, force my body to inch away. I smile ruefully. “Thanks.”

“Why?” he asks. “I should be the one thanking you.”

“Oh…” I blush. “For being a friend now. For the hug.”

He nods. “Hugs come free. The friendship, too.”

“Thanks. I could use them both now.”

“They’re yours. Anytime.”

Then Gabriele goes, and I watch him trail Chiara down the hall. I close the door, swivel around, and ease myself slowly to the ground, my body still tingling from our embrace. I wrap my arms around my knees and rest my head atop.

What was that?

Eventually I lift my head and stare at the glass mosaic on the wall for a long time—long enough that my eyes feel pulled into the green and pink glass, swimming inside them. Then the room refocuses. I pull out my phone, dread building in my chest. I scroll to Caro’s Instagram. To that shot of her at the Burj Khalifa, in her white sunglasses. May 24.

I take a deep breath, consider if I don’t just want to shelve this. Forget what Chiara told me. Forgetting would make for such an easier life, wouldn’t it? But somehow I know it—I didn’t sign up for the easier life.

My heart drums in my ears as I jump over to Nate’s page. He posts a lot for a guy, a noninfluencer. A few fundraisers, for human rights injustice type things. Otherwise architectural shots, stuff in nature, animals. A caterpillar, even. (A caterpillar got the feed, and you haven’t posted one of us in months? I remember asking, laughing. Look at the close-up! It’s a cecropia moth that can grow to be four inches, he said, zooming in, awestruck.) If I cruise down his feed, there are indeed shots of us that he hasn’t erased. I know this because since our breakup I’ve blocked him, then unblocked, then muted, then unmuted, all the while scanning his feed, peering at those old pictures of us for illusory clues.

But today I’m not looking for evidence of my past with Nate. I’m looking for other evidence; and when I see it, I freeze. It’s a video of a pool—just the water shimmering, nothing else. But the location is tagged as Dubai. And the caption says simply, “Breathe in, breathe out.”

Posted on May 24.