“Exactly,” and he clapped my shoulder.“Which is why you need fruit and gelato before you do anything stupid.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
He flashed a bright smile before turning back toward the stalls, all easy confidence and loud energy as he rattled off a list of items to one vendor.
I was barely listening.
Because my attention was drawn somewhere else as a man shouted,
“Bella!Bella!You came back for me!”
The voice was too loud and too eager.
Gianni waved a hand without looking back.“Ignore him.Happens all the time.”He kept talking, ticking items off his ridiculous list.
I barely heard him as something pulled at me, and I turned my head.
And to my complete and utter surprise, there she was.
Neve Trimboli.
She was standing beside another woman who had started tearing into the man shouting at her, hands flying, voice raised, fury written plainly across her face.
Neve stood stiffly beside her, clutching her bag, trying to inch away without drawing more attention to herself.
Her hair was loose, falling around her shoulders.Her cheeks were flushed from embarrassment or anger—I wasn’t sure which.
My pulse jumped.
Gianni looked at me, brows raised.“Well.That’s interesting—you taking an interest in something that doesn’t involve blood.”
He had no idea.
And now she was standing twenty feet away from me, completely unaware that her entire past was standing right behind her.
And this time… I couldn’t pull my eyes away from her.
12
Neve
Itook the long way home after the markets, cutting through the quieter streets like I always did.It added ten minutes to the walk, but it saved me two buses and a few coins—and every coin mattered when my rent drained me dry and my pay barely covered what I needed to keep breathing.
Tuscany was never supposed to be a permanent stop.Just a break.A month, maybe two.Time to get my bearings before moving on to the next place.Venice, maybe Rome, maybe even across the border to France for a while.I’d made a list once, but crumpled it up when it felt too hopeful, too much like planning for a life I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to live.
Then I met Zelda.
She had barreled into my life like it was her right to do so.Loud when she felt like it, quiet when she sensed I needed space, and never once looking at me like I was too damaged or too strange to deal with.She spoke to me like I was someone worth her time, with real patience and interest instead of rushed, polite curiosity.She became the closest thing I’d had to a friend in a very long time.
And for the first time in years, I’d felt like I wasn’t drifting.I’d had something that resembled steady ground.
And then there was Paolo.Loud, ridiculous, dramatic Paolo.He acted like the sun itself owed him a debt, but beneath all that noise was someone who genuinely tried.Someone who showed up every day, who flirted with Zelda because it was the only language he knew how to speak, who looked at her like she was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
I pretended he annoyed me, but watching him and Zelda dance around each other felt like witnessing a tiny miracle.A reminder that some people still got soft endings.I wanted to see theirs.I wanted to stay long enough to watch it unfold.Even if I knew soft endings weren’t for people like me.
But I couldn’t stay forever.I’d move on eventually.I wanted to see the world—reallysee it.Cities crowded enough to swallow me whole.Beaches warm enough to make me forget winter existed.Mountains high enough that the air felt new in my lungs.All the pieces of life I’d missed.All the things I’d never gotten to try.It was just… hard to leave the few people who finally made a place feel less empty.
I tightened my grip on the small bag swinging at my side as I turned down another narrow street.The sky had dimmed into late afternoon, that strange in-between light where the day wasn’t gone yet, but shadows started acting like they had rights over what was left.