I love this woman, Chiara D’Angelo.
Which is why Chiara and I were walking again through downtown Florence after dark. Fresh rain glistened on the pavement, steam rising in the lingering humid summer heat. Florence in early August never really quite cooled down.
Chiara was tucked against my fully healed side, her arm wrapped around my waist. I loved us like this . . . just wandering town together, talking about anything and everything.
“So do any of the triplets have more information about the scars and where we go from here?” I asked.
Tennyson and Dante had spent the last week digging through the archives, trying to find clues that their father might have left behind. As I had lost the ability to see the scars, we weren’t quite sure how to approach the problem.
“No.” Chiara leaned into my chest. “Turns out simply knowing what’s causing the madness is not the same as knowing how to stop it. You could see the scars you created, but there have to be more out there. We assume there have been cuts between our world and the shadow world as long as we D’Angelos have had our powers. We have no real understanding of what Babbo was trying to accomplish with the lightning that night on the tower.”
“And how do we close something that no one can see?” I replied.
“Precisely.”
We were at an impasse.
Bing.
Chiara got a text.
“I’m going to ignore that.” She smiled up at me. “I prefer being with you.”
Bing.
Bing.
Bing-bing.
My eyebrows went up. “You can look. You know you want to.”
She pressed her lips into a firm line.
I kissed her. I couldn’t resist. She looked adorable when she was thinking.
“I know I can look,” she said, “but I’m trying to be fully present in all my interactions with people. It was Dr. Cacciatore’s homework for this week.”
Surprisingly, Chiara took Dr. Cacciatore’s homework very seriously. Therapy hadn’t fundamentally changed Chiara, but she was starting to radiate the peace and calm of a person content with themselves.
Bing. Bing.
Bing.
Bing.
Bingbingbingbing—
“Seriously?!” Chiara yanked her phone out of her purse and glanced at the screen.
She gasped.
She squealed.
She began jumping up and down in the street.
“It’s FINALLY happening.”
“Pardon?”
