Page 5 of The English Bookstore in Bologna

The picture showed a lively crew sitting at a rickety wooden table inside the Osteria del Sole in the old town of Bologna. It was taken at a time when the world was oh so different.

Bianca let her gaze settle on the couple in the booth against the wall, the younger, skinnier her, a high-spirited brunette with one leg crossed over the other, a cigarette poking out of her mouth, and a handsome, mustachioed Italian who had been caught midsentence, surely talking about the origins of the bubbly red wine in their glasses. It had been no surprise that Corrado would soon chase his chef dreams in Paris.

“What do you have to say?” Bianca asked the couple. “You have a problem?”

She’d taken a gap year in Italy when she was twenty-two to find and save herself, because attaining two undergrad degrees at Pomona College had drained her and she’d wanted to recharge before grad school. She’d succeeded, rediscovering herself, recapturing her youth. In fact, she’d almost bailed on grad school and stayed put in Bologna. She now wished she had.

That night the photo was taken, her last night before returning to the US, she’d promised herself and Corrado that she wouldn’t get sucked back into her old ways: the overworking, the worrying about the future, the desperate need for control.

How naive could she have been?

Back in her office in the now, her frustration with herself rose up into a burst of fury.

She spun the frame across the room, a sharp “fuck” shooting from her mouth. The edge jabbed into the wall, then shattered on the hardwood floor.

Her eyes widened, shocked by her own rage. But this was it, her midlife—no, third-life crisis, reaching the exact moment of eruption.

Crossing the room, Bianca dropped to her knees, retrieved the bent picture frame, and shook loose the broken glass that hadn’t already scattered across the floor. Tears slipped down her cheeks.

A soft alarm chimed, and Bianca whipped her head around toward the clock on the wall. “How is it already eleven?” A client had canceled, so she’d had the last hour to wade through her self-despair and investigate the origins of her demise.

Pushing up, Bianca went to the phone on her desk and buzzed her receptionist. “Buy me five minutes.”

“No problem,” came a lively voice. “Is everything okay in there? I thought I heard something fall?”

“I . . . I knocked over something. Sweeping it up now.” Bianca cleaned up the mess, spruced up in the mirror, then sashayed down the hall with false bravado to the waiting room, where her lightly damaged clients thumbed through their phones until it was their turn to be picked apart by a woman who wasn’t afraid to tell it like it was.

Bianca’s smile could have scared the sunshine. “Lacy, so good to see you.” She could do vivacious when she had to, even when the inner Bianca wanted to burn everything to the ground.

“I pushed him into the pool,” Lacy said fifteen minutes later, while stretched out on the angular gray couch in Bianca’s counseling room. “At the Four Seasons. He was in a tux. And it was cold. For Austin, super cold. Steam rising off the water.”

Lacy was Bianca’s age, early thirties, and wore all white with espadrilles and a beaded turquoise necklace. She sat with her ankles crossed and held a gold pillow with tassels over her stomach. Above her hung a large canvas painting of an elephant with feather earrings that Bianca had bought at an auction last year.

“How many people were there?” Bianca asked, a smile splitting her lips, as unprofessional as that might be. She’d been trying hard to pay attention. At least Lacy’s story was getting interesting.

“Maybe sixty? All in formal dress, all influencers. Every one of them twisting their heads to gawk. Next thing you know, they have their phones out, filming the show like paparazzi. Now all of Austin knows our marriage is coming apart, and I can’t go anywhere without hearing whispers. Thank God for Whole Foods delivery. I come see you, and I go to the nail salon. Other than that, I’m imprisoned at home.”

Lacy paused. “Why did you stop taking notes?”

Sitting in her Swedish chair, Bianca pretended to glance at her “notes,” but actually looked down at the comic strip she’d started to draw, a series of panels, the first starting with a rough sketch of a plane taking off. In barely legible text, it read Bianca Airlines across the side. The second panel showed the same plane but included large-caliber gunfire chasing after it.

“I’m listening,” Bianca said casually, wondering how fast the state licensing board would pull her license if they got a load of today.

Lacy kept going. “He tried to play it off. You know how men are. A big smirk as he rubbed the water from his eyes. Then he pronounced with an awful grin that still makes me want to fill his mouth with broken glass, ‘It’s nice in here. Anyone else want to join?’ Men are such fucking idiots sometimes.”

Bianca did not comment. What she did do was continue drawing the third panel. Gunfire had struck the plane, and a part of the wing was falling from the sky. A cloud of smoke indicated lethal danger. In the distance, a missile gained ground.

Lacy kept rambling. “I need you to fix it, Bianca. I’m a mess. I can’t stand being around him, and I feel like I should introduce him with a disclaimer.” She dialed up the drama in her voice to say, “‘I’m Lacy, this is my husband, Gregg. For the record, we did love each other at one time, and he was interesting back then, but something happened, and now I’m drowning in regret.’”

This was what, Lacy’s third session? The woman could squeeze more words into an hour than any other client in history. Maybe Bianca should charge by the word.

While Lacy kept spewing her emotional vomit, Bianca drew the second and third missile strikes, showing the plane starting an emergency descent. The second-to-last panel showed the Bianca Airlines jet nose-diving toward its doom.

If only Bianca could recast the spell she’d been under, jump back into the bottle, keep sleeping through this life, but she now couldn’t unsee who she’d become. All because of the book!

From the outside, it looked like she had it all, didn’t it? A fancy apartment, a practice with an enviable waiting list, women around Austin raving about her. “That Bianca Briggs,” she imagined a client proclaiming to a friend after tennis over a lightly dressed Caesar salad and glass of pinot grigio at Austin Country Club, “She’s a woman whisperer. You must get on her list.”

Her online brand was growing too. Her Substack blog had reached almost fifty thousand subscribers, and she had even more followers on Instagram, where she offered weekly live sessions that expanded on many of the practices in her book.