That night, she spotted someone across the club, someone dark-eyed and muscular who walked directly over to her and started to dance with her. He didn’t ask permission. Rachelle felt her body echoing his. She felt the heat of his breath on her lips. Before the song was finished, he asked her if he could kiss her.She was drunk on wine and jet-lagged and brokenhearted from what her mother said, and was willing to do anything he asked. They kissed for ten minutes, there on the dance floor, before ducking into the night. He wanted to smoke in the alleyway, and she stood with him, talking in a mix of English and Italian. He asked who she was, what she did. She said she was Rachelle, an American. She was a sous chef. He laughed and said, “I’m a chef, too.”
This wasn’t hard to believe in Rome. Everyone was a cook, professionally trained or otherwise. But he soon went into his background, how he’d studied in Paris, London, and New York. Rachelle was intrigued. They even knew some of the same people. “How is this possible?” she asked.
“Rome is small,” he told her.
“The world is small,” she said.
His name was Riccardo.
Rachelle didn’t go home with him that first night. She felt too messy, too sad. But Riccardo asked for her number and called her the very next day. She was on her way to Diana’s kitchen, fixing her hair for a wild night of fire and oil and panic. Riccardo said he was on his way to his job, too. He worked as a sous chef for another chef Rachelle had met before, a friend of Diana’s. Rachelle melted into his beautiful language and his pledges to take her out when they both had time. She loved that they had similar schedules. She loved that he loved food as much as she did—not only for how it tasted, but for what it could do, scientifically.
Throughout that winter and into spring, Rachelle watched herself fall deeper and deeper in love with Riccardo. She was amazed at his intellect, his whip-smart humor, and his agility with a saucepan or a skillet. On their days off, they showed off the recipes they were cultivating or went out of the city to pick mushrooms and basil, or drank wine in bed, falling deeper inlove with every sip. It wasn’t till Rachelle had been dating him for four months that she figured out how wealthy his family was. She was surprised, as Riccardo seemed to live a similar life to hers in the city. It was as though he refused his parents’ money. She didn’t ask.
Riccardo didn’t ask much about her family, either. Had he, she might have told him that she, her sister, and her mother were currently growing apart. Since Christmas, she’d called them less and less frequently, and she hadn’t made arrangements to visit home anytime soon. This saddened her and darkened her mood when she let it. But she felt so enraptured with Riccardo, so distracted, that she allowed more and more time to pass.
After all, couldn’t they pick up the phone just the same as she could? Couldn’t they call her if they really wanted to talk to her?
It became a sort of competition. Who would be the one to keep their love together?
By the time Darcy had her new baby, Rachelle felt as though Darcy were a sort of stranger, a cousin she’d lost touch with many years ago. Darcy sent a photograph of herself, Steven, and the new baby at the hospital, Darcy bleary-eyed, the baby like a tiny red cabbage. Rachelle burst into tears in the bathroom of Riccardo’s place, but emerged clear-eyed and eager to eat the pasta he’d made for them that evening.
“It’s delicious!” she told him, gushing with love. “I can’t believe how lucky I am.”
It was that day that they dreamed up the idea of Rachelle’s restaurant. “You’ll be my sous chef,” she told him, because she couldn’t imagine a world where she wasn’t the boss of her own place.
Riccardo raised his hands. “You’re the boss, Boss!”
Now, so many years after Darcy’s second baby’s birth, so many years after Rachelle had last felt loved and protected byher Coleman family, Rachelle bolted to her feet and continued her run. Her legs burned beneath her, and her eyes shed water. She ran until her heart pounded and her ears tingled. She ran until she could almost, almost forget how tormented she really felt.
7
Rome, Italy
When Rachelle returned home from her frantic run through the city, she found Riccardo at the kitchen counter, shimmying his hips to an old Italian pop song as he spread Nutella across a slice of white bread. She kissed him, laughing at how comically Italian he so often was. “Just another cliché,” she joked. He swatted her and took a bite of chocolate-y toast, then turned it around so that she could take her own bite.
“Oh!” he said as she chewed through the melted chocolate. “My mother’s invited us for dinner tomorrow. Can you make it?”
Rachelle considered her schedule, considered that she hadn’t done anything for herself since the fire, and nodded. There was a twinge of fear in her gut, as ever, when she agreed to anything with Riccardo’s family. But she was marrying into his family, for goodness’ sake. She had to get over that.
The following afternoon, Rachelle began her preparations for the big family dinner by shaving her legs, doing her hair,perfecting her makeup, and changing her outfit three times. Rachelle had learned the hard way that Riccardo’s mother scrutinized everything she wore, her lipstick shade, the way she did her nails, and how she carried herself. Since she and Riccardo had gotten serious, Rachelle had forced herself to take her self-presentation more seriously—shoving away her previous laissez-faire “island attitude” to become an Italian woman in the big city. High heels were a must, unfortunately. That was the way the Russo family did things.
Riccardo’s mother sent a car to pick them up at their Trastevere apartment. Riccardo and Rachelle slid into the back seat, holding hands as they were ripped out to the villa on the outskirts of Rome. His mother’s driver, Benicio, spoke in a rapid, frantic Italian as he drove in a rapid, frantic style. Riccardo laughed many times and asked Benicio questions about his family. Rachelle felt too nervous to enter into the conversation.
When they arrived, Riccardo’s mother, two sisters, and father waited for them on the immaculate veranda, with a view of the rolling hills surrounding the city and the sea at the far end of those same hills. It felt like a castle in the sky. Riccardo’s mother, Valeria, kissed Rachelle three times, gushing in quick Italian about how pleased they were to welcome Rachelle into the family. “And look! His grandmother’s ring!” Valeria extended Rachelle’s hand out approvingly. Rachelle thanked her lucky stars that her nails looked all right. They suited the ring.
Riccardo’s sisters, Teresa and Gia, were similarly enthusiastic. They looked up to their older brother and wanted the best for him. The fact that he’d fallen in love with an American and dared to bring an American into their ritzy Italian old-money family was probably confusing for them, Rachelle guessed. She smiled nervously, then told them the story of the engagement, because they pressed her to give them every detail.
“Suddenly, the kitchen exploded,” she said, messing up the Italian slightly. “It was before Riccardo had time to put the ring on my finger!”
Riccardo laughed. “I thought the heavens had come down to earth, all because she was going to be my wife.”
Riccardo’s family cackled, clearly pleased with the cinematics of it all.
One of the family’s employees came to make them drinks: Negroni or an Aperol spritz. Rachelle sipped her Aperol, hanging back conversationally as Valeria and the father, Tony, talked about the day they’d gotten engaged. It wasn’t a very good story: a beach party, a barbecue. But they told it as though it was better than any Italian film. They kissed right there in front of their children and Rachelle, closing their eyes, as though they’d forgotten they were there.
“We’ll have a big wedding!” Valeria said, raising her Negroni toward the sunset. “We’ll celebrate you with everything we have!”
Rachelle was sort of miffed that none of them had mentioned the fact that her restaurant had burned down. To her, that was the biggest thing on her mind, the thing that kept her up at night. Her engagement felt secondary, as though it were always going to happen, something she could forget about. But everyone wanted to fixate on it.
