96

Marianna POV

The trattoria is exactly what Oliver described and also completely beyond what Oliver described, because Oliver's descriptions are enthusiastic but his sensory vocabulary is primarily sports-based, so the owner has been making it for forty years doesn't quite capture the specific atmosphere of a room with six tables and a ceiling that has absorbed forty years of good cooking, a woman in her sixties who assesses us when we walk in with the calm authority of someone whose cacio e p**e doesn't need our approval, and candles that are the working kind rather than the decorative kind.

We're given a table in the back. The kind of table that a restaurant like this gives people it has decided to accommodate—tucked away, good light, slightly separate from the room's main current of activity.

Duane orders in Italian, which I was not prepared for. Not tourist Italian, not the careful pronunciation of someone working through a phrase from their phone—actual Italian, easy and unaccented, a brief exchange with the server about the pasta that results in what I can only describe as mutual culinary respect.

I stare at him.

"What?" he says.

"You speak Italian."

"Some."

"That was not some."

"Enough," he says. "I lived in Milan for a season. You pick things up."

"It's conversational." He adjusts the napkin on his lap with the precision he applies to everything, regardless of scale. "I can't write it."

"I can't write mine either and mine is thirty words."

The corner of his mouth moves. "What are your thirty words?"

"Prego, grazie, cacio e p**e, and variations on where is the nearest—" I stop myself. "Actually, let's leave it there. The remaining words are bathroom-related."

The almost-smile. There and gone, but real.

We walk back toward the hotel through the Monza evening, which has settled into that specific September warmth—not summer anymore, not quite autumn, the temperature that exists briefly between the two and feels borrowed. The streets are narrow enough that our shoulders are approximately adjacent, which neither of us addresses or corrects.

"The fragment," I say. Not planned. Just—present, the way things are present on walks through narrow Italian streets in the September warmth.

He doesn't say anything. Listening.

"I've been thinking about talking to someone," I say. "A therapist. Not about the clinical side—not about the freeze response in the functional sense. About the other part. The part I can't see the shape of."

"Good," he says. Then, carefully: "What's stopping you?"

Honest question. No performance of patience, just the actual thing.

"I'm not sure I want to see the shape," I say. "Once you see something, you can't unsee it."

He's quiet for a moment. The street turns, opens into a small piazza with a fountain that's been there longer than any of us have been alive, lit from below in the Italian way that makes everything look like it's in a film about itself.

"I know that feeling," he says.

I look at him. "Your parents."

"There was a period—after, when I was racing junior formula—where I didn't look at the crash data. For any accident. Mine or anyone else's." He's looking at the fountain. "I knew if I looked I'd see exactly what happened to them and I didn't want the image."

"When did that change?"

"When I realized I was making worse decisions because I was avoiding the information." He turns from the fountain. "The fear of seeing something is usually worse than seeing it."

"Usually," I say.

"Usually," he agrees.

We stand by the fountain for a moment, the water doing its patient thing, Italy doing its ambient beautiful thing around us.

"I'll call someone when I get back to Miami," I say. "An actual therapist. I'll find someone good."

"Do you want help finding someone?"

The question is so practical. So Duane. Not are you sure or that's really brave or any of the things that would require me to manage someone else's feelings about my decision—just: do you want help.

"Maybe," I say. "I'll try first. But maybe."

He nods once.

We walk back.

I'm in the hotel lobby, key card already in hand, when it happens.

She's at the reception desk. Tall—I register the height first, then the hair, then the profile, then the full catastrophic recognition of exactly who she is.

Alina Lindqvist.

In Monza. At my hotel. In a cream silk blouse that probably costs more than three months of my Kinetic salary, standing at reception with a small rolling bag and the specific ease of someone who belongs everywhere she goes.

She turns.

Sees me.

Sees Duane, who has come in behind me.

Her face does something controlled and quick—a recalibration so fast you'd miss it if you weren't watching closely. Then she smiles. The kind of smile that is architecturally beautiful and tells you absolutely nothing about what's underneath it.

"Duane," she says. Like she's greeting someone she bumped into at a party. Like this is accidental. Like every instinct I have isn't telling me that nothing Alina Lindqvist does is accidental.

He goes still beside me. I feel it—the quality of his stillness changing, the way it's different from the focused stillness of concentration. This is the stillness of someone who has just been handed a problem they weren't expecting and are processing it very quickly.

"Alina," he says. Even. Giving nothing.

Her eyes move to me. The smile stays exactly where it is.

"Marianna," she says. Like we're old friends. Like she didn't stand in Duane's hallway and tell me I wasn't his type. Like she didn't call me at eleven PM from a number I hadn't saved to plant seeds of doubt that I spent four days trying to dig out. "What a coincidence."

The lobby is small. The three of us are approximately two meters apart. The night receptionist is looking very carefully at his computer screen in the way of a man who has developed a professional policy of not witnessing things.

I look at Alina Lindqvist in the Monza hotel lobby and think: this is not a coincidence.

"Small paddock," I say.

"Isn't it," she agrees.