West rolls his eyes. Still, I end my verbal explanation of our day’s itinerary, and we continue on in relative silence until we reach our station in Sorrento. While I’m distracted trying to follow street signs and the map preloaded onto my phone to get to the marina, cross-referencing with the email instructions from Paolo’s tour company, West seems to have jumped ahead to the next step.
“Cam, hang on,” he says, startling me when he grabs my elbow and pulls me to the edge of the sidewalk.
I look up from my phone in confusion. “What is it? We’re gonna be late.”
“How are we, like, playing this? What do you want me to do when we get there? I feel like we haven’t really talked about the specifics of how we’re handling the meeting, what you’re trying to ask and get out of it, and I just…What am I supposed to do?”
I pull my arm gently away from where he’s still grasping my wrist, which, by the look on his face, he hadn’t realized he was doing. I put a hand out in reassurance.
“Hey, it’s fine. We’re just trying to meet Paolo, see what he’s like, suss out anything about his past with my mom or in general, if we can. I don’t know, just follow my lead.”
The truth I haven’t told him is that I’ve thought very little about what I’m going to say to Paolo Bianchi other than “Did you sleep with Alexandra Lovett twenty years ago and then dip out when you learned she was pregnant with your child?” It’s probably best that he doesn’t even realize who I am, in case he kicks us off the boat before we’ve gotten a chance to say so much as a “buongiorno.” I think the best way to increase my odds of acting natural during this encounter is to not overthink it or overplan it.
I’d somehow forgotten that overthinking and overplanning are beloved pastimes for my partner in subterfuge. West was always the more careful of the two of us, and that’s one part of him that intensified sometime around our early teens. He was less open to ideas I had on the fly, and I learned to give him at least a few hours’ notice before doing something that wasn’t on his mental agenda. Or after a big group dinner with our parents’ field school students, he would need me to reassure him over and over that one throwaway comment he’d made was not an extreme embarrassment, nor did it make all the cool college students think he was an annoying, immature kid.
I was going through my own awkward adolescent phase and at the time thought that was just West’s version of the same. I’m not so sure of that now, with a few years of hindsight and rediscovering this older, more self-aware West, hearing him allude to how bad his anxiety was “before.” The ways he changed back then had felt different, I can see in retrospect. It hadn’t just been the stress of his dads’ struggling marriage taking a toll; I think he’d been in a whole other spiral of his own.
I feel the desire to pry open that box of things we don’t talk about, poking me to ask West about what he was going through back then, make him continue what he started to tell me in the library a few days ago. But this isn’t the time, so I set that impulse aside.
“Come on, we’ve got to get going,” I say to West. I reach out without really thinking to give him a pat on the shoulder. He rears back like I punched him.Oooookay. Physical touch, not a level we’re at just yet, I note with the smallest pang of disappointment, deep down in my heart’s hidden compartments.
Most of the town of Sorrento sits high atop steep cliffs that overlook the ocean and marina below. After all the rain, we’ve been gifted the perfect day for outdoor adventures—sunny, but a little cooler than I’ve gotten used to here. It’s even nicer as I start to feel the sea breeze coming off the crystalline waters, blowing through the couple of rogue curls that have already escaped from the bun atop my head.
The wind has its way with West’s hair, too. As he keeps a brisk pace ahead of me, the longer brown waves on top of his head get the Troll doll treatment, swept straight into the air in a gravity-defying pouf. He remains oblivious, but I can’t contain my smile.
In fact, as we meander down a steep, sloped walkway, turning back and forth on the many switchbacks where I should probably watch my step, I find it hard to watch anything but the guy before me. Even if the new hairdo is givingjust stuck his finger in a light socket, and he’s wearing swim trunks printed with a bunch of zeroes and ones that I refuse to ask themeaning of, there’s something so…compelling about West. I don’t know if it’s his perfectly straight posture that’s also somehow totally natural, or his long legs with calves rock-solid enough to crack a walnut, or his hands that, for some bizarre reason, I keep picturing when I’m trying to fall asleep at night, the mesmerizing memory of them fluttering across his keyboard.
Okay, I do know, and it’s all of those things and more.
I’m thankfully pulled from the WestFest party my greedy eyes have been throwing when we reach sea level and enter the marina. West steps aside to let me retake the lead, and we bypass row upon row of all sorts of watercraft, from Jet Skis to luxury yachts. Finally, I see the Bianchi Voyages flag hanging from a post at the end of a dock, a boat that looks just like the one on the website tethered there and a few people milling around it.
I’m suddenly extra grateful that West agreed to this, so I don’t have to go it alone. Even if he has worries or reservations, he hasn’t backed out, and his presence still gives me a confidence boost that I didn’t know was missing the last few years. I probably shouldn’t let myself get used to it, but I can enjoy it while it’s here.
As I start down the dock, his soft footsteps are a comforting echo behind my own. Beside the tour boat, a young woman greets us and confirms which tour we’re on before gesturing us into a small, shed-like structure on the opposite side of the dock where we’ll soon get more instructions and watch a safety video.
Inside, there are several plastic chairs set up, two alreadyfilled by an older couple with a distinctly American vibe about them—matching visors on their heads and matching fanny packs cinched around the waistbands of matching jean shorts. I smile as West and I take the seats behind theirs.
I lean his way, careful not to brush any part of me against any part of him, lest he accidentally bust a hole through the side wall of this seemingly flimsy structure in an attempt to get away from me.
“Safety video,” I whisper. “Now they’re speaking your language, huh? Should we make some popcorn?”
West is unamused. “You should probably pay close attention to it,” he murmurs back, “because if we start sinking or hit an iceberg or whatever, I don’t think I’m helping you.” I struggle to stifle my laughter until he says, “Also, Camilla Jacobs? Are we a married couple now?”
I’d hoped he hadn’t heard me give that name to the check-in lady, but of course I’m not that lucky. My cheeks go pink, and I do an awkward throat-clearing-slash-cough combination. The shoulders of the older woman in front of me tense, probably thinking I’m patient zero with some disease we’re all about to catch on this all-day tour.
“No, I just didn’t want my name to be, like, a tip-off before we even got here. We can trade last names if you want, and you can be West Lovett. Or for all they know, we’re brother and sister.”
I hear myself overexplaining but can’t seem to stop. West’s eyes dart away and I see his face flush a little, too. The wordsbrother and sistermust sound as wrong to him as they feel coming out of my mouth.
The last two members of our group arrive and spare me from saying anything else to somehow make the vibe even weirder. The woman who checked us in enters and begins giving an introduction about the tour company, which unfortunately includes nothing about the boat captain’s sordid past with an abandoned love child. We watch a brief video, full of helpful reminders like “Don’t take off your life jacket while the boat is cruising just because you want an even tan” and “Don’t lean over the side of the boat to try to touch the water.”
Then, with no lead-up or fanfare, a man wearing a white short-sleeve button-down and khaki shorts enters, and my heart starts beating triple time as Clipboard Lady and I say in unison,“Paolo Bianchi.”
Luckily, her announcement of his name after the wordcaptainis loud enough to drown out my awestruck whisper. Neither it nor my gaping mouth or rapid pulse has to do with Paolo Bianchi’s attractiveness, though he’s not bad for someone who could—in the most literal sense possible—be my dad. No, my shock is because this present-day man is so clearly the same person from those twenty-year-old Polaroids. It’s like I wasn’t fully convinced until this moment, despite West’s clever computer tricks and discovery of a few more recent pictures of the captain online. His in-person smiling face is undoubtedly the same smile that was aimed at a young Alex Lovett against a backdrop of the sparkling Mediterranean.
I’m pulled out of my trance by West’s voice unexpectedly piping up beside me. “Uh, yeah, I’m West Jacobs, and this is my…cousin, Camilla. Cammie,” he says, and hopefully no one else noticed the awkwardly long pause before the wordcousin.If they did, their faces show no sign of it, the older couple smiling at us, and the newest arrivals, an old man and much younger woman, looking politely interested.
The first couple introduce themselves next as Graham and Marge, two retirees from Michigan. They’re on a trip around Italy to celebrate Marge’s recent recovery from a hip replacement. Then the last pair go, and I’m stunned to learn that while I would have guessed they were grandfather and granddaughter, they are in fact honeymooners—Victor and McKinsley from Toronto.
