I can’t help but feel like I’ve meandered too far from my original mission. I was supposed to come to Italy, sleep, drink wine, eat pasta, and that was it. I wasn’t supposed to care about anything else. I wasn’t supposed to care about anyoneelse.
Once again, I’ve failed.
I’m so deep in thought, it barely registers when someone shouts my name. It’s a grating voice. Deep, low, with a sharpness that causes the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up straight. “Isabella Rhodes!” I hear again, and my instinct is to keep walking, but my legs freeze. I turn around.
I’m not surprised when the man approaches me. He’s red faced, bearded, massive with bulging shoulders and a beer belly. “You!” he shouts again as he gets closer. I freeze.
“Isabella fucking Rhodes,” he says, spitting all over me. “You have some nerve moving to another country. It wasn’t enough to ruin ours?” A woman catches up to him; she’s petite and wearing a backpack around her shoulders. She stands a few feet behind him with an equally disgusted look skewed in my direction.
I try not to cower or worse, verbally spar. What was Richard always saying? Stay calm. Try not toescalate the situation. I make my voice as still and even as possible. “I am living my life out of the public eye. I am not trying to ruin anything.”
The man’s eyes go black. He takes a few steps closer so there’s barely any distance between us, a foot tops. “You existing at all ruins everything.” An ominous chill trickles down my spine.
The man moves closer to me, a mere inch between his face and mine. “You’re a waste of a human being. You don’t deserve to enjoy the rest of your life. You tried to ruin all of ours. You tried to ruin America. All while you were trying to screw everyone in Washington.”
I put my hands up in surrender. None of that is true, but he has a good foot of height on me, and without Richard or any of my other former bodyguards, I’m defenseless. This isn’t the first time I’ve feared for my life during an altercation, but the lack of strong people who know how to disarm on my side makes the threat feel more real. “I don’t want any trouble.”
He moves closer and squats down so we’re nearly nose-to-nose. I swallow hard. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll disappear. You got it?”
An arm darts between us, a measly protective shield against this truly massive dude, but enough to keep him from getting closer. I quickly turn my head to my right and see Benito. “I need you to walk away before I call the police,” Benito says.
The man laughs loudly, and my eardrum shakes from the booming noise. “What are the Italianpolice going to do? Huh? Arrest me with spaghetti handcuffs?”
I laugh because it’s a funny image, but I’m terrified. Still, Benito doesn’t budge. He holds his arm steady, walking closer until he wedges himself between us. The man’s female companion lays a gentle hand on his arm. “Come on, Matt. Let’s go. She’s not worth it.”
Matt stares me down for another minute as if he’s deciding to finish me off right there. I have no doubt he could squash me with his bare hands and treat himself to gelato afterward with no remorse, but he backs off. He spits just to the right of me as if to show his dominance one last time, and leaves. We watch them walk away, the opposite direction from my house.
Benito grabs my hand, and we book it the last quarter of a mile to the house. The run does me good and helps to shake off the nerves. When we walk through the front door, I exhale, relieved. Benito follows me up to my room, locking the door behind us. “Are you ok?” he asks.
I fall onto the bed and fold my knees into my chest, getting into fetal position. “Yeah, yeah. I’m good. That hasn’t happened in a while, but I knew it was a possibility after the news came out.”
Benito sits next to me. “This has happened before?”
I nod. “I used to get accosted a lot in the early days of my term. I hired security and stopped going out in public without them and it got better, and after. . .” I lift my head and look at him, still woozy from thealcohol and the adrenaline. “After I lost, it got a lot better.”
Benito’s face contorts, and even from my lying-down position it’s easy to recognize it as the same as my parents’ when I first told them about such encounters: pity, sadness, fear. I don’t want him to look at me like that. Not because it’s humiliating to look like that in front of another person, although I don’t love that either, but because it was never supposed to come to this. If I had just stuck to the plan—no attachments, no ties to my old life—none of this would have ever happened. I’d be watching the sunset, drinking a glass of wine, wondering how I ever cared about anything other than life’s simplest pleasures.
“I’m sorry you went through that,” he says. “I’m sorry you had to go through that again.” I sit up so I’m level with him. He reaches his hand like he’s about to rest it on my knee but places it in his pocket. “Do you think you need security here?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. Maybe. I guess it depends if it happens again or not.”
Benito inhales sharply. “It’s unsettling to think you’re unsafe here.”
I shrug. “It’s the reality of my situation no matter where I go. I came to the most off-the-grid town I could think of, and I still ended up outing myself. Unless I want to live on my aunt’s ranch in remote Northern Ontario, I don’t think it really matters.”
“I’m going to find out who outed your location and give them a formal condemnation.” Benito runshis fingers through his hair. “A formal condemnation, Izzy.”
“You don’t need to do that,” I say.
“I should’ve done it a long time ago.” He starts pacing. “Let me get in touch with the police.” He takes out his phone and scrolls. “Or maybe we send this man’s photo to every business, and they can refuse him service. We’ll leak his name to the press. Matt.” He scoffs. “I hate that name. Matt.”
I stand up and put my hand over his phone. “Benito,” I say. I shake my head. “You don’t need to do anything.”
His eyebrows furrow. “Of course I do.”
I shake my head. “This is the reality of who I am. Or who I was.” I clasp my hands together. “We could freak out, that’s one option. Or”—I tilt my head at him—“we could forget it all.”
Benito’s face scrunches up even more and I miss its softness. I don’t like that I added to his ever-mounting stress. I resist the urge to run my fingers over the lines on his forehead. “Forget what?” he asks.
