Chapter 3

I thought I ought to be angry.

What I felt first was confusion, a dull blankness that made familiar objects look slightly wrong. The table. My cup. The little crescent a spoon had left in the foam.

My mother always said I was stubborn. Once I chose a road, I would keep walking long after any sensible person had turned around.

For seven years, I had done exactly that.

I had cried in locked bathrooms. Stayed awake after arguments that lasted until dawn. Accepted being invisible because Luca’s world was dangerous, because the timing wasn’t right, because there was always one more reason to wait.

I had found a way to make every hurt sound like something love could survive.

Now I couldn’t do it anymore.

Across the café table, Maya’s eyes filled as I told her what had happened.

“What the hell is wrong with him?”

She grabbed her phone. Her hands were shaking.

“I don’t care whose family he runs. He doesn’t get to treat you like this.”

Maya was one of the few people who knew about us. She had seen what those seven years cost me, including the parts I tried to make funny when I told her.

I touched her wrist.

“Don’t. He won’t answer.”

He didn’t.

By now, he and Chloe would have finished their movie.

Since the reunion, she had been posting constantly. It was hard not to feel that she was arranging each photograph with one particular viewer in mind.

Every post showed another small intimacy.

Luca had hurried out of our apartment that morning. Now I knew why. He’d bought the tickets in advance.

I refreshed her page.

A restaurant this time. Luca at a tabletop grill, sleeves rolled back, patiently turning pieces of meat. In the next photo, he was cutting her food into smaller bites. In the last, he was feeding her.

“You’re his girlfriend,” Maya said. “You. How can he just—”

She stopped and took my hand instead.

“Ellie, please tell me you’re not going to let this go.”

“I’m ending it.”

Saying it made my throat tighten. Maya’s expression changed, and I knew the question she was trying not to ask.

Could I really leave him?

I held her hand a little harder.

“I mean it.”

Outside the café window, a young couple had stopped beneath the awning.

The boy held out a bouquet of paper roses. Pearlescent paper, a little glitter on the edges. Someone had drawn the veins on each petal by hand.

“I know you’re allergic to pollen,” he said, stumbling over the words. “But it’s our anniversary. I still wanted you to have flowers.”

The girl looked at him as if he had handed her something priceless.

Once, Luca had been that boy.

Before anyone called him Don Moretti, before his father’s death put the family in his hands, he had blushed when I told him he looked nice. He had stayed awake half the night after I gave him the bracelet, sending photographs of it on his wrist.

At school, when a teacher accused me of cheating and began singling me out, Luca had been the first person to stand up for me.

I was painfully shy then. He had never made me feel small for it.

We kept our relationship quiet, as teenagers sometimes do, believing a secret made things more precious. Across a classroom, our eyes would meet, and that was enough to make me smile for the rest of the lesson.

I used to write his name in the margins of my textbooks, then erase it before anyone could see.

On the afternoons we stayed late at school in Boston, we walked home with the sunset spilling across the sidewalks. Luca would fall into step behind me, reach down with those long fingers, and hook his pinkie around mine.

I would swing our joined hands a little.

“Ellie,” he said once. “We should apply to the same colleges.”

Then he laughed at himself.

“Obviously we should. We’re going to be together forever. I don’t know why I’m asking.”

Outside the window, the couple walked away, hand in hand.

I paid for our coffee. Maya hugged me at the corner, and I took a car back to the apartment.

Then I began packing.

There were more little things than I remembered. They filled a box before I had even finished the living room.

Luca came home and frowned at it in my arms.

“Where did all this junk come from?”

He glanced inside, then sighed.

“Just throw it out. It’s taking up space.”

For a moment, I couldn’t answer.

Then I smiled.

“Okay. I’ll get rid of it.”

Most of it had come from him.

A four-leaf-clover pendant. Framed photographs. Things he’d made before he could afford to buy me anything. A little book of handwritten coupons, including one he’d given me after our first real fight.

Once, he couldn’t find something interesting without wanting me to see it too.

Now he sat down and began typing on his phone. A smile slowly touched his mouth.

He didn’t look up again.

When I carried the box past him, I caught the sweet trace of Chloe’s perfume on his shirt.

I wondered if he even knew it was there.