But Benjamin chased her, unwilling to let her go without a fight. By the time he caught up with her two piazzas away, tears stained Francesca’s dress. She’d lost her silly café job. Now what was she going to do? But here was Benjamin’s hand on her shoulder. She turned into him, inhaling his wonderful salty scent. But she wouldn’t hug him, she wouldn’t kiss him. She wouldn’t let herself.
“Let me explain,” Benjamin breathed. “Please. I’ve come all this way.”
Francesca took a staggered breath and followed Benjamin a few blocks back, where he’d parked a motorcycle. They didn’t speak and instead got on and rode what felt like half the city away, although Francesca felt out of her mind, and the streets felt blurry and strange to her. Still, Francesca couldn’t fathom where he was taking her. She wanted to scream and sob into his back. When he finally yanked the motorcycle into another piazza and parked it near a little outdoor bar, where sunshine glowed across the cobblestones and pillars, he helped her off and led her to a table, where he ordered them a big bowl of ice cream and said, “You can hate me. You’re allowed.”
Francesca crossed her arms over her chest. “Why are you here?”
The server returned with a massive bowl of chocolate ice cream and two spoons. Benjamin knew how much she loved ice cream. He remembered that she’d gobbled it up almost daily at the White Oak Lodge back in 1969. She’d been a child back then, or at least that was how it felt now. But she picked up a spoon and swept it over a beautiful ball of ice cream and closed her eyes as it melted on her tongue. “You’ve never been to Europe,” she added, realizing the distance he’d traveled to be here.
“I’ve never been to Europe,” Benjamin repeated. He made a show of looking around, taking in the piazza. “It’s really something.”
“I can’t believe they let you out of the Lodge,” Francesca said cruelly. “Doesn’t your father need you?”
Benjamin cleared his throat. “I know it seems like a sort of prison for me. In many ways, it is. But it’s my family’s legacy. It’s my home. I can’t turn my back on it.”
Francesca flared her nostrils, remembering how she’d wanted to carry on her father’s legacy of being a filmmaker before she’d failed both him and herself. But she was a woman. She was bound to fail, just as Arturo had said. The ice cream was melting in the hot October sunshine. It was too fast. She couldn’t keep up with it.
“Francesca,” Benjamin whispered tenderly, “I came to apologize.”
Francesca glared at him and set her spoon down, waiting.
“I wanted to write you back immediately,” Benjamin said, speaking of that time more than a year and a half ago, when her letter had gone unanswered for months.
“You didn’t,” Francesca shot back.
“I didn’t,” Benjamin breathed. “Things have not been easy at home.”
Francesca felt the knots in her stomach loosening. She put her hands on her thighs and told herself to remain focused. She couldn’t fall into Benjamin Whitmores' lies, nor his easy smile.
“You remember my brother, Ronald,” Benjamin said.
“Of course.” She kept the photograph Benjamin had sent of himself and his brother in the second drawer of her bedside table, but only allowed herself to look at it when she felt particularly grim and brokenhearted.
“Ronald has had a hard time,” Benjamin said quietly, hunching his shoulders. “During Christmas of 1969, he got into a car accident and broke his leg in three places. We were all terrified, of course. But after he went through surgery, they gave him medicine that changed him. He hardly spoke to meanymore. He never got out of bed if he didn’t have to, not even when he regained full motion of his legs. I did my best to pull him out of it. I sat in his room almost every night, playing cards or trying to talk to him. Sometimes he went along with it. Other times, he stared out the window and refused to acknowledge I was there.”
Francesca’s ice cream was long forgotten, a puddle of milk in her bowl. She was captivated by Benjamin’s story, her hands cupping her elbows.Poor Ronald, she thought, thinking of that sweet teenager whom Benjamin loved so very dearly. She could imagine Benjamin’s heartache, his fear. She could envision how devastated he was. But was that enough of a reason not to write Francesca for nearly two years?
“How is he now?” Francesca’s voice was thin.
Benjamin sighed and gazed across the piazza. “His moods are still the same. He’s been hanging around a different kind of crowd. I think they’re taking drugs, getting up to no good, and drinking too much. I’ve lied to my father about where Ronald was more times than I can count. But I keep thinking he’ll figure out his life. I keep thinking it isn’t too late for him.”
Francesca reached across the table and took Benjamin’s hand, surprising herself. Her heart thudded. She knew what Benjamin meant when he said all this. It meant that all of the responsibilities he’d once shared with his brother, Ronald, now fell completely on Benjamin’s shoulders. Stress marred his face. This was why he looked so different, she decided. He’d aged, yes. But he’d also taken on the burden of his entire family. He’d loved his brother more than his brother could love himself.
Benjamin blinked back tears. Francesca told herself not to sob. “How did you get away?” she asked finally, marveling that Benjamin had traveled all this way to explain the depths of his soul.
“It happened because your father came to the Lodge,” Benjamin said, surprising her. “He’d just finished something out in Hollywood and swung by to say hello. My father and I sat with him on the veranda to catch up, and he talked about you, how wonderful you were doing here in Rome, studying film and working on a set. After he went to bed, my father looked at me and told me I’d gone pale. I thought I was going to faint. I explained to him that I’d let you get away, that you were going to become someone incredible and forget about our summer together. He said I should come to Rome to tell you that, before it was too late.”
Francesca’s sharp and cold heart melted at the edges. She burned to tell him what had been going on here: getting fired not once but twice, watching her roommates grow up and get engaged, feeling as though the rest of the world was taking off without her. But all the while, Benjamin had thought that she was the one taking off without him. If she told him she was a failure, would he still want her? She thrummed with confusion.
But before she could figure out what to say and how to say it, Benjamin whispered, “Can I kiss you?” And she cleared the distance between them, pressing her lips to his and falling into his arms. Maybe she didn’t need to face what she’d done and how little she’d managed to accomplish. Perhaps—as her gut had told her two summers ago—she was bound to Benjamin Whitmore and the White Oak Lodge. Maybe her future was an American one, glitzy and rich and blustery with Atlantic winds. When their kiss broke, Benjamin grinned at her sloppily, his eyes filled with questions he didn’t dare ask. And then Francesca had a premonition, right there in the city she loved and the city she’d planned to become famous in: I will be married to Benjamin Whitmore within the year. She knew, deep in her bones, that it would be so.
Chapter Six
Present Day
So many years after Francesca abandoned her fledgling film career, left Rome, and ran after Benjamin Whitmore as if her life depended on it, Francesca called her doctor and postponed the surgery meant to save her life. “There are things I need to do first,” she explained to her miffed and annoyed doctor. “Things I will regret never doing if I can’t.” Her biggest fear was that she wouldn’t live through the surgery or that chemotherapy would knock her sideways and disallow her from living in the way she liked during the time she had left. And now that Benjamin was alive and well on Nantucket Island? She had to see him before it was too late.
Allegra and Lorelei—neither of whom knew about the surgery nor the cancer—were annoyed yet felt forced into going with their mother to Nantucket. Francesca had hinted to them too many times that she needed them. That their family needed to come back together again. Francesca eavesdropped on them from the guest bedroom in Allegra’s apartment, grumbling inEnglish to one another as they discussed what to pack and what they were going to miss in Rome to be there—work engagements and social outings with their fancy Italian friends. Francesca guessed they chose to speak in English because their husbands were less inclined to listen. But Francesca’s English comprehension was still stellar.
