Charlotte and the others had decided to pay for a charter despite there being cheaper ways to get to the grotto. Lilly had heard Julian say they could even reach it by land. But Charlotte wanted to spend a couple of hours on the water—not just be ferried back and forth—and Lilly was glad Sloane and Julian had agreed. To her, being on the boat was one of the coolest things in the world. The coast was gorgeous from the sea! All the buildings—even the huge cathedrals with their domed tops—looked like miniatures. And the colorful houses cascading down the cliffs resembled jewels the mountains were pouring into the sea.
Lilly especially enjoyed looking at the ancient towers that’d been built to protect the old villages from pirates. There were more than she’d ever imagined. The Saracens must’ve been a big problem. The round stone towers—some crumbled, some almost intact—reminded her of tiny castles. Charlotte said they were built fifteen hundred years ago, which made them almost a thousand years older than America!
That something could last so long filled Lilly with a sense of wonder. Of all the sights they saw while they were on the boat, she loved the towers most because they captured her imagination.
But some of the cathedrals in Italy were almost as old, she reminded herself.
The wind flung her hair around as she sat in the bow, the sun causing the water to sparkle and shimmer all around her. She felt so grown-up in her swimsuit. It was a blue one-piece, not a bikini like her mother had always preferred. But she thought it was pretty. She was also wearing a cover-up very similar to Charlotte’s—Charlotte had bought them both at the same place—and the same beach hat as Sloane. From a distance, she probably didn’t look much younger than her sister and her sister’s friend because she was as tall as they were.
Maybe one day she really would grow into her feet, she thought, examining the bright orange polish on her toes. Just before they’d left the villa, Charlotte had offered to paint her nails, and they’d turned out so pretty it no longer seemed to matter that her feet were too big.
“Look at you—grinning like you’ve never been on a boatbefore,” Sloane said as the outboard hummed steady as a bee. “You’re obviously not seasick.”
Shehadnever been on a boat before. But Sloane already knew that. “Nope.” Standing, she held out her arms like Rose in the movieTitanicand let the wind ripple through her cover-up. “Ilovethe movement. Don’t you?”
“Ido. It’s my stomach that’s not all that excited about it,” she said with a pained expression.
Lilly felt guilty for wishing their trip would continue forever. “Will you be okay? Should we go back?”
“No. The skipper gave me some Dramamine. I should be fine in fifteen or twenty minutes.”
Lilly asked to stop for a swim, and the skipper found a small cove near Positano, where they all jumped into the water.
“Good idea, Lilly,” Sloane said as they cooled off. “This should give the Dramamine time to work.”
Julian had hung out with her a lot at first, but recently she’d been spending most of her time with Sloane. Maybe that was another reason she was enjoying herself so much. He was with them today. Charlotte was, too, and she wasn’t so preoccupied. She seemed to have forgotten about her divorce and her book, at least for the day.
After they swam for a while, when Sloane was finally feeling better, they climbed back into the boat and motored to the Emerald Grotto, which was closer to Amalfi than to Positano. The cave wasn’t as big as Lilly had expected, but she loved the light hue of the water and smiled happily for a picture with Charlotte, then one with Charlotte and Sloane and a selfie of all four of them that Julian took because he had the longest arms.
Her sister and her sister’s friends didn’t treat her like a nuisance, she realized. They didn’t act as if they didn’t want her around, the way so many of her mother’s boyfriends had. They treated her like she was a valued member of the group.
“I’d never even heard of a grotto until I moved here,” Lilly told them as their skipper maneuvered carefully around all the other boats jostling for a turn inside the cave. “Do we have any in America?”
“Good question,” Charlotte responded and checked the internet on her phone. “Apparently, we do,” she said after a quick search. “Religious grottoes, man-made grottoesandnatural ones.”
Lilly wrinkled her nose. “Isn’t the point that they’re natural?”
“You’d think,” Sloane said.
Charlotte tipped the brim of her hat to remove the glare from her screen. “I guess man-made ones are a thing. Says here that the Midwest has a whole bunch of Catholic grottoes—the largest collection in the world.”
Disappointed that the ride was almost over, Lilly watched the opening of the cave and all the boats waiting around it disappear from view. “What areCatholicgrottoes?”
Charlotte, who’d gone back to reading, looked up. “Grottoes made by German Catholic immigrants, evidently. This article says they’re considered folk art.”
Lilly tightened the string under her chin so that her hat wouldn’t blow away now that the skipper was going so fast. “I can’t even imagine what a fake grotto would look like.”
“Maybe you should pull it up on your phone,” Charlotte said.
Lilly blinked. “What phone?”
A smile spread across her sister’s face right before she dug inside her bag and pulled out Sabrina’s phone. “Onthisphone, which belongs to you now,” she said and handed it over.
Lilly had wanted a phone since forever. “Are you kidding?” She searched her sister’s face to be sure she wasn’t going to add “while we’re in Italy” or something else that suggested she’d take it back.
“I’m not kidding,” Charlotte said. “It’s all yours.”
“Forever?”
