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Loved.

Like every scratch on the wooden floor and every creak beneath my feet has a story attached to it.

I don't need Damiano to tell me which one of those beams he bumped his head on as a child or where he and Jude sat after coming back from riding horses. I already know. He told me those stories so many times I can almost hear his voice filling the silence.

I take out my phone and speaker and press play. Eppure Sentire by Elisa starts playing as I open the cabinets to see if they have everything I need. They do.

I take my bag and walk into the hallway. There are three doors. I open the first one and find a master bedroom with a private bathroom, but I walk straight back out.

It doesn't feel right.

So I open the second door and stop in my tracks.

Damiano's old room.

The same room he always stayed in whenever he came back.

I remember our video calls and him sitting on that bed.

I swallow the lump in my throat.

The bed is neatly made, a faded navy comforter stretched over it like someone has been waiting for him to come home. The wooden desk beneath the window is scarred with little scratches and dents, years of homework, drawings and teenage boredom etched into its surface. Above it hangs a shelf crowded with trophies, ribbons and medals, and leaning against the wall beside it is an old soccer ball, the leather worn smooth from years of being kicked around.

I smile despite myself.

“You and your soccer balls.”

On the dresser sits a collection of framed photographs, and the first one steals my breath.

A little boy with messy dark hair and impossible blue eyes grins at the camera, his arms wrapped around Jude and Dex. They're covered in mud, all three laughing so hard Dex is bent over holding his stomach.

In another they're a few years older, standing proudly beside a horse much too big for them, and beside that one is a whole group of children sitting on a fence with cowboy hats far too large for their heads.

Jude and Dex. Damiano. A whole childhood frozen forever behind glass.

My fingers brush the edge of the frame.

“So this is where you came from.”

I keep looking.

Above the bed hangs a large poster of a beach I'd recognize anywhere.

Sicily.

The water is so impossibly blue it almost doesn't look real, and beside it are more photographs, these ones older. A much smaller Damiano sitting on an old man's shoulders while they both eat watermelon, another of him running barefoot through a narrow stone street with women leaning out of balconies smiling down at him, and one of a table overflowing with food and more aunts, uncles and cousins than I could possibly count.

In the last one, someone is lifting a tiny Damiano into the air while everyone around them laughs.

I smile through the ache growing in my chest.

“You had two homes.”

Just like me.

Italy had lived inside both of us long before we met each other.

I look around the room one more time, at the soccer ball, the trophies, the photographs and the faded Sicily poster, and everywhere I look there are pieces of the boy I never got to know. The boy who became the man I loved.