Chapter Twenty-Three Ginevra

Let’s talk about Nate.”

A week into interviews, and thus far, Rory had spoken around him. Ginevra had walked Rory through enough of her childhood, darted between Max and Ansel, delved thoroughly into Rory’s career. But Nate remained the elephant in the room.

Rory sighed, discreetly checked her phone. The time flashed: 7:56 in the evening. The interval, already, of the passeggiata. Through the windows directly opposite, Ginevra could glimpse indistinct people milling out in the piazza, a blur of glossy shoes and sport jackets, pigeons fluttering above the fountains, the sky gone violet.

“I could be violating labor laws by keeping you this late.” Ginevra smiled, but she didn’t follow it up with You may go. No, this conversation was pressing, overdue. If she wanted to finish formulating her entire plot, she needed this part done.

Rory smiled back. “I signed up for long hours.” She sipped her wine—Ginevra had opened a very good Bordeaux. Ginevra followed with a healthy sip of hers.

“Nate and I met in college, my senior year. We were at Rick’s, a dive bar. I was a waitress, and he was with his buddies. I brought them over this shark bowl. It was our signature drink. Disgusting.” Rory grimaced. “Like radioactive blue. You were supposed to put your hand to your forehead, like—”

“A shark’s fin.” Ginevra smiled.

“Yes. You’ve done one before?” Rory’s eyebrows quirked in surprise.

“Oddio! No.” Ginevra didn’t say she’d read about the shark bowl in an article about Rick’s in Ann Arbor, in which she’d also learned that the bar was named after the one in Casablanca.

“Right.” Rory smiled. “I can’t quite imagine you at Rick’s.”

“I can assure you I’ve never been.” Ginevra laughed. “So you gave Nate the shark bowl, and let me guess, was it love at first sight?” Ginevra could almost feel it, all her senses submerged in a foreign pinky glow.

But to Ginevra’s surprise, Rory shook her head vehemently. “God, no. I figured he was a total frat boy. Entitled. Cute, I’ll give him that. Baseball cap—”

“What color?” Ginevra asked, scrawling.

“Light blue. And he had his collars double popped.” Rory’s face pinched in distaste.

“Double popped?” The article hadn’t mention that phrase.

“It means you wear two different collared shirts, and the collars stand up even more. You could also triple pop. The higher the number of pops, the bigger the douchebag the guy. It was a late-aughts thing. I don’t think the double pop is anywhere close to still on trend.”

Ginevra wrote furiously. This was the stuff—good atmospheric color to sprinkle in.

“Nate and his friends asked me to do the shark bowl with them, so I did. Good for tips, but I pretended to drink. You get good at it, pandering to groups of rowdy guys. Anyway, the night wore on, and I barely noticed Nate, but when I finished my shift, I saw him on the phone outside. And he was almost—I dunno—crying.”

“Crying?”

“Not exactly crying, but he kept saying, Is he going to be okay? in this really terrified voice. And I didn’t know what was said on the other line, but he didn’t have a jacket on. So he was, like, shivering, with bare arms, although good that he had that extra shirt for insulation.” Rory smiled sadly.

“That used to be a joke of yours?” Ginevra guessed.

“Yeah. Anyway, turns out his brother had overdosed and was at the hospital. Later I found out it wasn’t the first overdose. I offered to drive Nate there. And Nate tried to refuse, said he could drive just fine, but he was clearly in no state to be behind the wheel, so I took him.”

“Nice of you.”

Rory shrugs. “Anyone would do it.”

“I don’t quite think so.” But Ginevra decided to leave it at that. “So you bonded in the car?”

“No. He white-knuckled the door handle and kept saying, over and over to himself, This is my fault. So finally, after a very long ride of him saying that, I said, Did you give him the drugs?”

“And Nate looked at me, all surprised. I think it was the first time he really noticed me. I wasn’t my most attractive, let’s say—hair pulled back, sweaty from the night. Outfit all black that concealed Shark Bowl splashes. But when he looked at me, I felt—”

“Something.”

“Yeah.” Rory nodded slowly. “Something, I guess. And Nate said, No, I didn’t give him the drugs, but I’ve been preoccupied. And then he told me stuff. Like, I learned he’d grown up in DC and all over the world, because his father was a diplomat, but then when his father retired, they moved to my same area of Michigan, where his mom’s from. Like a thirty-minute drive from Ann Arbor. That’s why Nate decided to go to grad school in Ann Arbor, when he got into programs at Columbia and Georgetown. He told me that he was getting his master’s in international relations, and simultaneously working remotely for a think tank in DC, basically full-time. I was so surprised, because, like I told you, I pegged him as this douchey frat boy, and he was anything but. I asked him about the double-popped collars, and he groaned and said one of his buddies had told him it was cool. Then he pulled the collars from his neck and said he felt like he was being strangled by them!”

Rory smiled, but then it quickly faded. “He told me that between school and work, he hadn’t had time to check in on his family. He hadn’t gone back home to visit in a month. Then he said that maybe he’d been glad for the distraction. The excuse. I could tell there was something deep there. Then Nate said, I’m the only one who can keep Garrett in line. That’s his brother. The younger one.”

“What did you say then?” Ginevra asked.

“I said—” Rory stopped. Her face shaded. Ginevra could tell there was something there. Something important.

“You said you understood,” Ginevra supplied.

Rory looked away, toward the framed photo of Sophia Loren, but then finally returned her gaze. “It just came out. I didn’t even know I felt that way. That I felt responsible for Max like that.”

“Not only for Max.” Ginevra had pieced a few things together. “For your father, too.”

“In a way. I mean, they weren’t addicts. It feels a little ridiculous, the comparison. I had a great father. Have. And Max, he’s—he’s the best brother I could imagine. Truly.”

Ginevra didn’t record it. Instead, she found herself scrawling her signature, over and over, the same way she always did, with artistic flourish—a circle swirl hanging down from the a. Everything Rory had said was swimming, perhaps drowning, in Ginevra’s brain. It all felt familiar in a way she could vaguely pinpoint. Needing to convince yourself so badly on one front, because without its fundamental truth, the world collapses as if it were made of sticks.

“But,” Ginevra finally said, the feeling still gnawing at her.

“But… sometimes they needed me in a way that felt like too much. I told you about Max, and the kids bullying him.…”

“Yes. But your father? He needed things, too?”

“He did.” Rory nodded. “If I’m being honest. To you and myself.” She told Ginevra then about Ansel’s money problems, about paying bills herself, about how she got into the habit of taking rolls of toilet paper from school and hiding them in her backpack, then depositing them in the bathrooms at home, so Ansel wouldn’t have to purchase them.

Sadness surged in Ginevra. Anger, too. Mostly at herself. The feeling that she wished so badly she could gather that little girl into her arms. How she wanted to make it better—how she should have made it better.

“You never went hungry, though, did you?” Ginevra finally asked.

“No. Honestly, Papa was amazing. He worked so hard. Maybe some of our financial difficulties were in my head. I always had everything I needed. And maybe I didn’t need to pay our bills—maybe I should have left it to Papa to figure out, because he always did.”

“It’s important to feel needed,” Ginevra said, realizing it struck a chord for herself, too, but not in a way she thoroughly understood.

“Not as a child.” Rory shook her head firmly. “As a child, you don’t want to feel needed.”

“That’s right.” Ginevra heard her voice hitch.

“You want to feel loved and like you are perfect just for being your pure self,” Rory said.

“Yes.” Ginevra couldn’t prevent it—the cascade of her father’s voice returning to her after all this time. La mia belleza, he always said, cradling Orsola’s head to his chest in uncharacteristic physical touch. And Orsola soaked it in, radiant.

Domenico never called Ginevra his beauty. Not even once.

You want to feel loved and like you are perfect just for being your pure self.Yes. Rory had summed it up quite perfectly. The ideal childhood. If Ginevra had learned anything from her main characters, it was that pretty much no one had one.

“So what happened—you went to the hospital with Nate? You stayed with him?”

Rory bit her lip. “It was awful—his brother was in a coma. His younger one,” she clarified. “Garrett. Nate’s older brother has Down syndrome. It was like, a total mess. His parents were a mess. And when we arrived, before his parents spotted Nate, I just watched him, this supposed frat boy I’d written off, and he squared his shoulders and, like, made himself toughen up, and he went in there, almost… This sounds ridiculous, but almost like he was going into war. And then he hugged and reassured and said positive things, and talked to the doctors, and I saw how his parents could let go, could lose it, because Nate had assumed control. He’s good in war zones, too. That’s where Nate shines. In a crisis.”

“It impressed you,” Ginevra said.

“It made me sad. But, yes, it also impressed me. And I suppose I saw Nate as a person you could lean on.”

“Yes. You were looking for a man like that. Makes sense.” So little in life did, so it was nice, pleasing, to tease out the things that did. “And then what happened?”

“And then I stayed there with him, got his parents waters and stuff, and at some point Nate came over to me, and he started to say how he couldn’t thank me enough, and I could go now, could he pay for the gas, and I don’t know what came over me, but I said, You look like you could use a hug.”

Ginevra felt tears poke at her eyelids. What a wonderful girl Rory was. Ansel had done well with her. With both of them.

“What did Nate say?”

Rory crunched down on her lip. “We hugged for I think the longest hug I’ve ever had in my life. After, he stepped back. He was kind of embarrassed, I think. And he said, Thanks, Rory. I’m okay now. I can take it from here. I really appreciate everything you did for me tonight. For basically a stranger.”

“And you said?” Ginevra asked, even though she already suspected what followed.

Rory smiled sadly. “I said, You’re not getting rid of me yet.”

Silence for a while, as they both absorbed it all. That’s one thing Ginevra had learned—big feelings needed big room to breathe. You couldn’t flit from one emotional land mine to another. You needed to give main characters space. Time. Cushioning.

In the silence, Ginevra played with her burgeoning plot, slid ideas out of little file folders and shifted things around. Later, she might reread The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side for inspiration. German measles as the cunning clue that unwound the mystery for Miss Jane Marple. Or Death on the Nile. The victim as the murderer. Utterly ingenious. There must be a reason those books called to her again. It was worth investigating. Over her career, Ginevra had received many negative reviews, but the one that stung most called her “derivative Christie.”

It stung most because, perhaps, there was a kernel of truth to it. Ginevra knew her strengths—she could come up with brilliant plots, modern ones. But she needed her ready-made characters fanned out before her, and she needed a grand twist.

And there were only so many twists. Dame Agatha had basically siphoned them all!

But there was a saying with story—around five basic stories exist. Every bestseller has recycled one of them.

The victim as the murderer. Yes, that one was intriguing. What does it mean to be a victim? Isn’t that what Ginevra and Rory were cycling around this whole conversation?

No, Ginevra wasn’t derivative. She’d done the best with the hand she got dealt. With the mistakes she had made. With the path she’d decided to walk down, despite the consequences.

Oh, the consequences.

But derivative, no. It wasn’t a crime, after all, to marinate in a little genius, repackage it for the entertainment of millions.

Or if it was a crime, then fine, Ginevra was guilty. Add one more strike to her long list.