“I didn’t—”
“You didn’t what?”
“I didn’t think—”
“Think I had eyes? Ears? A brain?”
“No, it’s not that, I just—”
“It was very obvious that you cared about him. And if my windows were open, I could sometimes hear the two of you carrying on.” She raised an eyebrow at me, and I blushed. “You have a very distinct laugh.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “I want to die.”
“Don’t do that,” she said.
I looked at her.
“You are young. You should be with someone who makes you laugh like that.”
I could picture the bedroom in that fourth-floor apartment perfectly. Its windows flung open, the curtains blowing in the breeze. To be back there would be such a pleasure.
“What went wrong?” Francesca asked.
“He didn’t tell you?”
“The most we could get out of him was that you were giving each other some space.”
I felt sick, hearing it put that way. “He was tired of all the secrecy, and he wanted me to tell Paul.”
“And did you?”
I nodded.
“Does Teo know that?”
I shook my head.
She gave me a small smile, like she knew something I didn’t. “We have an expression in Italy… ‘L’amore non è bello se non è litigarello.’?”
“?‘Love is not beautiful if it is not a quarrel’?”
“That’s it, exactly,” she said. “But there’s a second part to the saying. It goes, ‘Amor senza baruffa, fa la muffa,’ which means something like ‘Love without a quarrel, it grows mold.’?”
“You’re saying Teo and I needed something to fight about?”
“I’m saying that sometimes, when you fight, you find out that the love is real.”
151.
A CORPSMAN WAS TAKING LAURA’Sblood pressure when I slipped into her exam room. “Did I miss anything?” I asked.
“Blood pressure looks great,” he said.
“What took you so long?” said Laura, and I told her about the protests and running into Francesca.
“We’ll get you in front of Dr. Callaway as soon as we can,” the corpsman said to her after he’d made a few notes in her chart.
“I still think we should go,” Laura said to me after he’d left.
