“It’s not gray. It’s grilled.”
“Sure,” she said, cutting into a slab of toasted bread with chopped tomatoes, basil, and olive oil. It was a simple dish, but there was nothing like the Genoese basil and Ligurian olive oil. Ellie felt the hunger fog lift from her head and sat back in her chair, looking out over the sea. Current company not included, everything was perfect—the sun, the waves, the breeze. She let herself glance at him from behind her sunglasses. He had cut the weirdly flat bun in half and was attempting to bring his lunch to life with some salt, pepper, and tiny packets of mustard.
“Can you pass the napkins?” he asked, pointing to the metal container on her side of the table. Without looking, she shoved the box toward him with one finger.
“Ragazzi!Good! I’m glad you’re eating something.” Graziella and Lucrezia cruised by the table on their way back down to the beach, no doubt for the post-lunch, post-Burraco, afternoon swim.
“Cos’è?” asked Lucrezia, pointing a manicured fingernail about a quarter of an inch away from the odd formation on Cris’s dish.
“I ordered a hamburger.”
“But why?” she asked. There was no correct answer to this question, of course. “Sbagliato,” she said, and there was a great puffing of lips and many head shakes from the two ladies.
“Anyway, Cristiano,” Graziella began, placing her hand on Cris’s shoulder. “Your grandfather told me about your problem. I am sorry to hear this, but you don’t have to sit on your hands about it.”
“Well, I don’t know that I would call it a problem yet,” said Cris, his eyes darting from Ellie to Lucrezia. “It’s just some guy making stuff up.”
“I would!” Graziella continued. “You are a big star and people love to see a big star fall. If you didn’t care, maybe you wait and see how bad it gets. But that doesn’t seem like you, Cristiano,” she said.
“Grandma, maybe this is a conversation you would want to have without me here,” said Ellie, trying to keep a lid on her curiosity. Was it actually possible that both she and Cris were having major personal crises in the middle of all of this Circus Maximus?
Graziella pointed with her chin at the rest of the beach club. “Who here is a stranger?” she asked. Lucrezia made a clicking sound with her mouth, echoing the sentiment. Privacy had limited value with this crew.
“Thank you, Graziella,” said Cris. “It’s very very sweet of you to worry.”
Lucrezia touched Graziella on the arm and her eyebrows went up behind her shades. It was time for the ladies to exit.
“Well, I’ll leave you two kids to your lunch.Buon appetito!” Graziella squeezed Ellie’s shoulder and turned to Cris, pointing at his plate. “I have ginger candy in my bag. It’s very good for stomachaches. Let me know if you need one. Okay, we’re off.”
Ellie watched as the ladies headed down the stairs to the beach, unsure what to say next. A giant white seagull lifted off from the peak of the café roof and flapped its way toward the sea, then dipped and rolled toward its mates and became part of the clan again. Should she even be curious about what was going on with Cris? She’d avoidedthat for years with zero difficulty. Then again, it was pretty easy tonotgoogle someone, but it was an entirely different story when news arrived tableside in a hibiscus-print bikini and a raffia tote bag. Maybe she should stop thinking and let the conversation happen naturally. She turned back to Cris, who was staring at her, an expression on his face that matched the one from the time it took him three days to tell her he lost her friendship bracelet playing Calcetto. She sighed.Sure. Just stop thinking.
CHAPTER 7
Cris and Ellie sat staring at each other for a long moment. He broke first, picked up his hamburger, went to take a bite, then put it down again. She was still staring at him, probably conjuring up every horrible, nasty thing she could imagine him getting into while wishing he’d disintegrate. Suddenly thirsty, he cracked the cap off a bottle of mineral water and took a sip. There was only one way to get out of this, which was to get straight into it.
“Some guy wrote an article about me inSports Illustrated.” Silence. Ellie dabbed a gloss of olive oil off her lower lip, and he almost lost his train of thought entirely. Cris tried to refocus. He was tired of going over the events in his head and had used most of his courage in telling Simone earlier. But she was waiting, it seemed, expressionless and no longer eating.
“You know I’ve had a bunch of surgeries on my shoulders.” He looked up at her face, but again, there was nothing. She probably had no idea. And why would she? “Well, I’ve had a bunch of surgeries onmy shoulders. Lots of people have the same kind of problems that I do. They have surgery, go through PT, and can keep going. I did everything they told me to do, with no shortcuts. I had no reason to think it wouldn’t be okay.” He paused and took a sip of water. “The doctor told me that they’d been able to repair everything with the last surgery. But it didn’t feel like it. The pain was…” He trailed off.
Ellie lifted her chin a tick. She was listening. He was scared to tell her but wanted her to know somehow. He knew he’d better keep talking or he would lose his nerve.
“The pain was awful. It was there all day and all night. Not only when I was in the pool, but when I was sitting and showering and eating and trying to sleep. I’m not stupid. I know I’m thirty-two. It’s not old, but I knew this summer would probably be my last shot at another medal.” He put his head down. Man, it was getting hot out here. She was still looking at him with a totally blank face. They hadn’t had a full conversation in over a decade and this is how he was choosing to get reacquainted? Maybe she wasn’t actually listening. “You don’t want to hear this.” He pulled the baseball cap off his head and ran his hands through the mop of dark hair that tumbled out.
“Do you have a story to tell?” she asked.
“Yeah. I have a story to tell, but it’s not what that guy wrote.”
“Then you should get used to telling it to people who may or may not believe you.” She was right. If he was looking for sympathy or understanding, he was going to have to work for it—with her and with everyone else in the world, too. He took another sip of water. She wrinkled her nose under her sunglasses and gestured around the terrace. “And lucky for you, I’ve got a lot of time and no place to go.”
“Fine,” he said, deciding to not read into her comment. “Well, I found myself fantasizing about not swimming anymore. I’d never donethat. I always spent all of my time trying to figure out how to do more, not less. I’d had all the surgeries there were to have and I could see that I was going to have to make a decision. It was killing me. I talked to my agent, my coaches, other teammates, and told them that I was done. It wasn’t a secret that I was going to retire. I was waiting to announce it to the public at the right time. I figured, let’s wait until after the new year and start fresh. But I made a mistake. My last week in the pool was the week before Thanksgiving. I was in so much pain and I wanted to be done—just to end the misery. I’m not the guy to take painkillers, you know? I mean I’ve been trained my whole life to not take that junk. Even when I had my wisdom teeth out, I downed a few Motrin and went to sleep. I don’t do anything stupid.” A slight twitch flashed on her cheek, but he kept going. “So, I found out about this stuff that you can take that doesn’t get rid of the pain, but it’s supposed to help you heal faster. I thought maybe that would be a way to get around it. Maybe if I could fix it faster, the pain would get better.”
“But, why didn’t you announce your retirement first before trying anything?” As much as he was glad she asked it, because it meant that she was interested, he hated this question. It was the one thing he didn’t have an answer to.
“I don’t know.” He shook his head.
“You don’t know or you don’t want to know?” she asked, finally taking another bite of bruschetta.
Cris leaned back in his chair. He knew. Of course he knew. “When my father died, there were a lot of reporters calling me.”
