Page 168

Like she did not search through a life I had buried, find the one person I never let myself look for, and bring her back to me with a phone app I mocked her for using too much.

I cannot process it.

"How are you?" I ask Chiara, because it is the only sentence I can form.

She smiles, and there is gray in her hair at the temple, same place as mine, and something about that undoes me further.

We should have seen each other age. That is the thought that hits hardest. Not all at once, not like this, with two decades missing between one breath and the next.

'I’m good,' she says. "Truly good, Valentino. I have a family. Two boys, terrors, both of them. The younger one bites. I have a man who adores me. He knows everything and he adores me anyway, which took me a long time to allow."

She glances toward Amanda on the steps.

"Your woman wrote to me, and I read her message four times. I sat in my kitchen and understood I’d been waiting twenty years for someone to ask me that question. She helped me see I needed this. To talk to you."

"There’s no need."

The words come out fast, automatic, the old reflex firing before I can stop it.

"Chiara, you don’t owe me anything. I understand why you couldn’t…"

"You don’t." She says it gently, but it lands like a slap. "You don’t really understand, and that’s my fault, so be quiet and let me fix it."

The fountain at the bottom of the steps keeps splashing. Somewhere behind us, a street musician is murdering a love song. The smell of roasted chestnuts drifts past from a cart, and I stand very still in the middle of all of it.

"I didn’t stay away because you failed me," she says. Her voice does not waver now. "I never once thought you failed me. You were sixteen, and you ran at two grown men with nothing in your hands. Do you know what I remember from that day? I remember your voice. Screaming my name while they held you. That’s not a boy who failed. That’s the only person in that alley who fought."

My jaw aches from how hard I’m clenching it.

"I stayed away because of the shame," she says. "Mine, not yours. Every time I imagined your face, I saw you looking at me and remembering, and I couldn’t carry my own weight and yours too. You walked around our village like a man dragging a corpse, Valentino. Everyone could see it. I couldn’t stand to watch you feel like that because of me, so I made myself disappear, and I told myself it was kindness."

She exhales, slow and unsteady.

'It wasn’t kindness. It was fear, and it cost us both twenty years, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry I let all that time pass."

I have done worse things with a steadier face.

Standing here while she forgives the boy I have hated for twenty-two years nearly breaks it.

"But I’m here now," Chiara says, and she touches my forearm. "And I’ll be here as long as you want me to be. Twenty years doesn’t erase where we came from. It doesn’t erase what you did for me."

I cannot look at her for another second without losing the little control I have left, so I turn my head and find Amanda.

She is exactly where she said she would be, sitting among strangers, watching pigeons strut around a dropped gelato cone, giving us our privacy and pretending she is not checking on me every forty seconds.

Her hair has come loose on one side. She looks tired from travel and pleased with herself and hungry enough to become dangerous soon.

She looks like the most ordinary woman in Rome.

She found Chiara.

Not because I asked.

Because I didn’t.

I gave her Chiara’s name once, in the dark, like it was something I had no right to keep and no strength to explain. Amanda didn’t push. She didn’t make me bleed it out for her. She listened, remembered, and went looking for the one person who could tell me the truth I had spent half my life afraid to ask for.

For twenty-two years, I thought Chiara’s silence meant she could not bear the sight of me.