Page 166 of Valentino

"In your sleep."

"There are weeks of my life I can't account for. Tiramisu is the most likely explanation."

She laughs again, harder this time, head tipping back, and the gray-haired couple passing us smiles at her the way everyone smiles at her, like she's a window someone finally opened. Something pulls tight under my ribs. It's been doing that for weeks. I've stopped checking whether it's a medical problem.

The Steps rise up ahead, that wedding cake of travertine spilling down from Trinità dei Monti, crawling with people sitting where the city has decided people may no longer sit. The fountain at the bottom burbles its eternal complaint. I slow down without deciding to.

"I wanted to ask you something," I say.

Amanda stops dead in the middle of the street. The spoon freezes halfway to her mouth and her whole face goes courtroom-serious, eyes narrowed, shoulders square.

"What now?” she says. "What happened? Who do we know that's dead, arrested, or missing? Rank them by urgency."

"Nobody's dead."

"That you know of."

"Amanda." I throw my empty cup in a bin and face her, and Cristo, this was easier in my head. In my head it was one sentence. In my head I didn't have an audience of four hundred tourists and a Bernini fountain. "Do you want a house here? In Rome. Something that's only ours."

She blinks. Twice. A vespa whines past behind her and she doesn't flinch, which six weeks ago she would have, and the fact that I notice that tells me everything I need to know about what I'm doing.

"Are you for real right now," she says. It isn't a question. It's an accusation with hope inside it.

"I'm—" The words stall. I push through it anyway, because she taught me that, whether she knows it or not. "I'm not good at this part. Asking. I take, I handle, I arrange. Asking is new." Her eyes have gone soft and enormous and it's making it worse, so I look at her mouth instead, which is also a mistake. "What I want to say is that I want you with me. Here, Chicago, a tent in the goddamn Alps, I don't care about the geography. If you want Chicago, I'll live in Chicago and complain about the pizza until I die. But I want you where I am."

The fountain keeps burbling. Somewhere up the Steps a street musician butchers "Volare," and Amanda stands there in the gold light with cocoa powder on her lip, looking at me like I've handed her something breakable.

"You better find an apartment in the next seven days," she says, "because I'm not leaving this town. I'm warning you. This is your notice."

Something detonates in my chest, quiet, no shrapnel. I don't have a name for it. It might be happiness. I've had so little practice with it that I genuinely can't be certain. It could be happiness or it could be cardiac arrest, and standing on this street with her grinning at me, I'd accept either.

"Seven days," I say. "I'll have keys in two."

"Show-off."

"You fell in love with a show-off. That's a you problem."

Her phone rings.

She digs it out, glances at the screen, and her eyebrows jump. Then she turns her back to me to answer it. Turns her whole body away, shoulders curling around the phone, voice dropping, and something old and ugly rises in me before I can kill it.

What the fuck.

I turn.

For one second, I hear nothing.

Not the traffic. Not the tourists. Not Amanda behind me.

A woman walks toward us through the gold light and the tourists, dark hair threaded with silver, a navy coat, a face I have seen every night for twenty-two years in the part of my mind I never enter willingly.

Older now. Lines at her eyes. The same way of holding her chin slightly down, like she's walking into wind.

My hand drops to my side.

For a second, I can't breathe.

Chiara.