Rose petals.
A four-poster bed.
Me scrunching sheets in my fists.
“Oliver, stop!”
Technically, he applied the brakes when he realized. I’m sure he did. Not long after, anyway. Maybe he didn’t hear me the first time …
“You should see a doctor about this pain,” he suggested when my unreliable body thwarted a second attempt.Maybe I should?“Or just try to get out of your own head, Evie.”
Of course, the more out of my head he instructs me to get, the more inside it I seem to go, worrying he’ll soon be sick of me if I can’t fix this. I twist the sapphire and diamond ring that he splashed out on the next morning in a tiny jewelry shop on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. It’s on my right hand. I mean, obviously it is! I had a moment of panic when we started looking at rings, and a whoosh of relief when it became clear that this was just a gift and not something more.
“Just enjoy it!” he’d said, hugging me when I complained that it cost too much. “You overthink everything!”
He wipes the tears from my face now at the fountain. He hates to see me sad.
“Aren’t you meant to make a wish?” he asks, fishing around in his jeans pocket for a coin. What more could I theoretically want? He’s everything I always imagined. Or he should be. Imean, it’s normal to havesomedoubts, isn’t it? Traveling together in close quarters is hard work. Even for people who’ve been together for years. I read that in an online quiz I did the other day after I made too much of a fuss about his absence for a few hours and ruined the dinner he’d planned at a secluded little bistro near the Spanish Steps.
His mention of the wish sets me off again. Because this is Bree’s moment. We were meant to stand in this exact spot, hold hands, and make this wish together.
“Close your eyes,” Oliver says softly. The Italian sun is punishing. He’s staring intently at me, wanting me to believe in the magic of this experience, and I just feel hot and tired and sad and—“Trust me, Evie.”
I close my eyes as he presses the coin into my palm. He maneuvers my body so I’m standing with my back to the fountain. And he takes my hand.
“Okay, make a wish,” he instructs, and even though I know I’m totally wasting this opportunity, I wish Bree were here. And that I were more assertive, and that everything would be okay. Is that greedy? It’s three wishes for one coin, and I’m starting to feel like there isn’t enough magic in the world to whisk away my anxiety. I know I had it before, in Australia, but over here, away from my moorings, it’s taken on a life of its own. It’s not so much about unfamiliar places, or the understandable challenge of being in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language. I’m anxious about making mistakes. Taking wrong turns, figuratively and metaphorically. I’m beginning to feel as though everyone around me—all these locals and tourists, Bree and the others, the entire cohort of gap-year travelers in Europe—has their act together. Except for me.
When I open my eyes and wipe them, Oliver is standing in front of me. Not beside me. And he’s got a silly grin on his face. I’m dazed by the harsh sunlight and wondering whose hand I’m holding if it’s not his.
“Surprise!” Bree says, throwing herself at me so hard she threatens to tip us both into the water. I can hardly speak, as Oliver captures it all on video and all my fear just evaporates in this one incredible moment.She is here.Therelief. She tries to break away from our hug and I won’t let her. I pull her closer and hold her harder.
“How did you … What is happening?”
She laughs. “It was all Oliver’s idea!”
I stare at her, and then at him.
“Isn’t this exactly what you wished for?” he asks.
All my doubts seem to rush away in this instant. “You did this?” I ask him, still in shock that she’s really here.
He smiles and pulls me into his arms. “I love you, Evie. I’d do anything to make you happy. You should know that by now.”
45
Drew
Why I torture myself with Bree’s Instagram post about her Trevi Fountain bestie reunion is beyond me. I don’t follow Evie anymore. Not since I bungled that high school apology, she doubled down on her attachment to Oliver, and we fell out. And now I’ve scrolled through Bree’s carousel of images of the two of them reuniting in Italy more times than is remotely healthy.
A memory returns of Evie on that dance floor in Year Twelve. She’d eventually looked up and seen me in the doorway to the ballroom. She’d tried to break away from Oliver to talk to me, but he’d grabbed her arm and pulled her back. I saw him shake his head and watched her listen intently to his pointed advice, and then the music changed and he pulled her into a slow dance from which her attention never reemerged, and I couldn’t watch. So I left.
Evie had come over to my house the next day, but I was at the hospital with Mum. She called me, but I let it go through to voicemail. I couldn’t have Mum overhearing my explanation and feeling even worse than she already did. I wanted to explain later. Wanted to tell Evie everything and lean on her through it, but how could I do that without sharing Mum’ssecret? My loyalty had to be to Mum. Every time I tried to set things right, the excuses in my head sounded either too flimsy or too outrageous.Sorry, something came up at home. Sorry, your boyfriend’s father got my mum pregnant, and when I found out, she lost her mind and wound up in the psych ward.
In the end, by the time I worked out exactly what to say, it was too awkward to say anything. I backed away and hurt her until she stopped chasing me for answers. I’d already let her down once. She was better off without this complication in her life.
Even seeing Evie in a photo now triggers memories of that first night in the hospital. They’d shifted Mum from acute care to a ward upstairs. I’d thought,Fine, we can cope with this—a few days and she’ll be out.But no. Once the psych team got involved and questions were asked about her panic attack, a litany of issues spilled from her secret.
“It was the whirlwind romance of my life,” she admitted to me, sitting in the garden at the hospital one afternoon. “He adored me. He was obsessed with me, really. Fancy private dinners at his house. Weekends in secluded hotels. Gifts.”
