“Yeah. And you could have called them. You’ve basically fallen off the face of the earth.”
He looked down. Was that shame I saw? He nearly said something, but then he thought better of it and closed his lips. That irreverent attitude he’d been trying to put on vanished.
I was getting impatient. I hadn’t gone there to argue. I stepped toward him. He looked cautious, vulnerable, fragile—just as fragile as I felt.
“Lucas, I’m here because someone told me once I needed to live according to my instincts. That person told me intuition is an impulse born inside us. A desire. A thing we really want, more than anything else. And my instinct brought me here to tell you something: that I don’t regret leaving, but I do regret not telling you some things before I did.”
His eyes looked distrustful, but he asked me, “What things?”
I took a deep breath and gathered as much strength as I could.“There’s lots of them. I honestly don’t know where to start. All this, everything here, you don’t want it, it isn’t you, and you know that. Obviously your family matters to you and I know you’re worried about what might happen with your father, and that’s a good thing. But that’s not what’s keeping you here. It’s guilt. And that’s not fair, because you never did anything wrong and you don’t have anything to make up for! It’s not fair for you to make these sacrifices.
“This is your life we’re talking about, and you’ve given it away to people it doesn’t belong to. For weeks, I’ve been watching you become a different person. You’re not yourself anymore. You’re someone you promised yourself you’d never be again. Slowly you’ve been disappearing, to the point that I hardly recognize you now, and what I regret the most is that I stood on the sidelines watching it happen when I could have helped you. I’m sorry I left like you didn’t matter to me. I’m sorry I told you there was never an us. That was a lie. Of course there was. And there could still be one.”
My eyes were burning. In a hoarse tone, Lucas asked, “Still?”
The taxi driver called out, “Hey, just so you know, my shift’s about to end.”
“I’ll be right there,” I said.
Lucas’s shoulders were tense, and he was looking past me rather than at me, while my emotions were like a choppy sea inside. I added one last thing. “I love you, Lucas. That was the other thing I needed to tell you.”
His eyes opened wide, showing me all the mixed emotions he felt. He blinked and shook his head as if he didn’t believe me.
“You say you love me, but you’re leaving again? Is this some kind of cruel joke?”
“It’s not a joke. I love you so much, but I’m going because my place, my family, my home is in Sorrento. It’s where I belong, and it’s where you belong, too, Lucas. In that villa full of people whotruly love you, who only want you to be happy. A place where the mornings smell of sea and coffee and the nights of barbecue and limoncello. Where we can take naps in the cool bathtub and whisper songs into each other’s ears. Where…where you don’t need wings to fly.”
My voice was cracking, and we looked at each other with glassy eyes. Then someone appeared behind him.
“What are you doing out here? You need to come unwrap your presents.” It was Claudia. She froze briefly when she saw me, but soon she regained her composure.
“Oh, hey,” she said. “Sorry… What was your name again?”
I looked away and pretended she wasn’t there. With my eyes, I begged Lucas to make a choice, knowing the taxi driver was getting impatient. I was terrified: I kept telling myself that this was our only opportunity. “Don’t stay,” I told him. “No matter how much you think it’s your duty. Don’t stay.”
Claudia grunted and said, “Lucas…”
I smiled at him as if it were just the two of us and that farewell could only be temporary. “Goodbye,” I said, turning to the taxi.
“Goodbye? I thought you didn’t like that word. I thought it was toodefinitive.”
I felt a spark of something just then. Was it joy? Because his voice told me he wasn’t just sad, he was amused.
“And I thought you liked complicated things. That you had a talent for unraveling them.”
He smiled—a real smile—and with that, I felt he was giving me my life back. I held on to that image like a treasure in my mind as I got into the taxi and closed the door. Leaving him behind. Traveling away.
I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt to go. That my heart didn’t ache. That I didn’t want to tell the driver to screech to a halt so I couldjump out and run back to him. That it didn’t cut me to the core to think that this might be the end for us.
But it was a risk I had to take.
They say with time, everything ends up where it should be.
And I hoped we’d wind up at each other’s side.
73
We landed in Rome early in the afternoon.
