If she could somehow manage to cope under that cascading torrent of issues in her life, how would adding this to the mix change anything? Perhaps, despite appearances, this might help Lucia forge a new path forward. Towards love.
She shook her head to clear it. ‘Va bene. Help me do this.’
Francesco’s eyes widened. ‘Really? Are you sure?’
‘Sì. But only if you—’
‘Of course I will.’
Foscari shifted in Lucia’s lap and pawed his way up her chest to rest his chin on her shoulder. Then Lucia felt his little body suddenly tense as he let out a series of short yaps in the direction of La Commedia.
Both Francesco and Lucia turned to look at it, but La Commedia remained dark within.
‘Where do we begin?’
Francesco scrolled to the first of the four remaining messages in his inbox. ‘Famously, at the beginning.’ Scanning his eyes over the Instagram handles, he laughed. ‘Fifteen-year-olds are more creative than these men.’
Lucia rose, collected a pad and pen from her desk, and returned to the window. She quickly flipped the pages containing her notes about loans and financial planners until she came to the first blank page. She drew up a rudimentary table on the pad, and Francesco listed the names of her potential kissers. ‘Davide. Claudio. Paolo. Nicolò.’
‘Start with Davide?Chi è?’ she asked, curiously peering over his arm at the screen.
Francesco swatted her away. ‘No. If we are going to do this properly, it must be based in fact, first and foremost. Add three columns to your table. Mask. Physical appearance. Situational knowledge.’
Lucia obeyed. ‘What if they don’t give all the information?’
Opening the first message, incidentally from Davide, he said, ‘We demand it.’
Lucia and Francesco managed to laugh their way through the table filling, and sent a few return messages to ask about missing clues. Davide was immediately scratched from the list for his follow-up comment about Lucia having looked so beautiful in her red dress, which it most certainly wasn’t.
‘Claudio. Paolo. Nicolò. It might be one of you,’ Lucia said, pursing her lips tightly as she ran her eyes over the patchworked table. ‘Can I see a photo of them, now?’
Francesco hesitated. ‘All three profiles are set to private. But this is what you can see.’ He clicked on Paolo, whose message was now first in his inbox. His bio was a collection of emojis. ‘Aries . . .’
Lucia scowled. ‘The Zodiac? Not a good start.’
‘This is why I wanted to stick to the facts.’
Lucia mimed zipping her lips.
Paolo’s bio continued with the weightlifting, cycling and motorbike emojis.
The sensation of the man’s rough hands returned to Lucia’s mind. ‘It could be him . . . if weightlifting could give your palms calluses.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because the man I kissed had very dry, rough hands. As if he did repetitive manual labour.’
Francesco clicked Paolo’s profile pic, and it enlarged slightly on the screen. ‘This man?’
All Lucia had seen that night was the man’s chin, mouth and eyes. But even then, the circles around his eyes, including his lids, had been painted black to better disguise him behind the mask. Lucia squinted as Francesco, unable to enlarge the picture any further, took a screenshot of Paolo.
The slightly blurry image was of a man sitting atop his motorbike, wearing sunglasses.
‘I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘Ask him about the mask he was wearing that night.’
Francesco nodded, and pinged back a message. ‘In the meantime, Claudio.’ Francesco tapped Claudio’s entries on the table. ‘Says he’s tall.’
‘Exactly,says.’
