“There she is.”
Sophie laughs. “Go write something devastating about pasta.”
“I already did.”
“Then make it worse.”
“I’ll try.”
“You’ll succeed.”
The call ends with her blowing me a kiss I pretend not to receive. The screen goes dark. I sit there for a moment with the phone in my hand and the quiet room around me. The crumb is still on my dress. The coffee is finished. My notebook is open to the line Lucia gave me, and outside, Rome is burning brighter by the minute. I brush the crumb away. Then I turn back to the page and write one more note before the feeling can disappear:
Some cities do not heal you. They keep you occupied while you remember how to do it yourself.
I look at the sentence until it stops feeling like something I wrote and starts feeling like something I should probably believe.
That is usually when I close the notebook.
I have learned not to overwork the useful lines. They arrive clean or they do not arrive at all, and if I keep touching them, they start to bruise. I cap my pen, set it beside my laptop, and stand from the desk because sitting too long after a call with Sophie is a terrible idea. She has a way of entering the room from another continent and rearranging the furniture inside my head.
The balcony doors resist when I open them, then give with a soft wooden complaint. Heat pushes into the room, carrying the smell of warm stone, cigarettes, and the café downstairs beginning its lunch rhythm. Plates clink. A scooter shudders over the uneven street. Somewhere above me, a woman shakes out a sheet and the white fabric snaps once in the sun before disappearing back through the window.
Rome is loud enough to be useful.
I take my phone from the desk and check the time.
11:03 AM.
No new message from Ethan.
I should feel nothing about that. The absence of a text is not an event. It is not generosity, restraint, growth, punishment, strategy, or proof. It’s a blank space on a screen. Still, my thumb pauses over his name before I lock the phone. That irritates me enough to make me productive.
By 11:17, I have rewritten the opening paragraph of the Rome dispatch. By 11:42, I send Diana the Santa Livia notes in a clean document, labeled properly, because Diana believes bad file names are early evidence of moral decay. By 12:05, I am walking toward lunch with my sunglasses on, my notebook in my bag,and Sophie’s warning tucked somewhere I can reach without letting it drive.
He’ll try when you’re tired.
I am not tired.
I am hungry.
There is a difference.
The lunch restaurant sits behind a butcher shop near Testaccio, hidden through a narrow passage that smells faintly of rosemary, meat, and old tile. It is the kind of room that looks accidental unless you understand how much work it takes to make something feel undesigned. Paper placemats. Heavy glasses. No music. Walls lined with framed photographs of men in aprons, men holding knives, men standing proudly beside animals no one in a modern dining room wants to imagine becoming lunch.
I order trippa alla romana because avoiding tripe in Rome feels cowardly, and cowardice has never improved a meal. The server looks at me for one approving second before writing it down.
The dish arrives red with tomato, bright with mint, and finished with pecorino that softens into the heat. It is rich, earthy, unapologetic. The texture demands attention. The sauce tastes like someone’s grandmother won an argument with poverty and never stopped refining the victory.
I write:
Tripe: not rustic as branding, rustic as memory. Mint keeps it alive. Pecorino gives it spine.
The sentence works. I keep it.
By the time I return to the hotel, the sun has sharpened. The streets are white-gold and punishing. A group of tourists has gathered in the small piazza near the fountain, all of them pink-faced and wilted, listening to a guide explain something into a microphone while no one looks capable of retaininginformation. I pass them, climb the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator, and reach my room with sweat at the back of my neck and a clean line about tripe repeating itself in my head.
The phone buzzes when I am unlocking the door. I know before I look. That annoys me too. Inside the room, I set my bag on the chair, place the notebook on the desk, and take out the phone with more care than the object deserves.
