Chapter Sixteen West #3
“So much for giving Mom the impression of ‘everything is fine and normal with your daughter, nothing to see here,’ ” Cammie whispers as we walk through the site and hear the voices of Ilaria and Dr. Alex getting closer.
“I’m an hour later than I said I would be and have a boy with me.
Might as well write mischief on my forehead. ”
“I can go,” I offer, gesturing over my shoulder with a thumb.
Cammie knows I find the documentary thing to be A Lot.
Now that I’ve had some time with her and feel like things with us are solidified, I’d be fine to head back to the Villa Russo library and see about earning back some of my group chat respectability on Project Euclid.
But Cam shakes her head slowly, saying, “Nuh-uh. You don’t get to smooch and scram—you’re stuck hanging out with me.”
I’m about to give “smooch and scram” the heckling it deserves, but she whirls on me suddenly, finger pressed to her lips and eyes wide.
I clamp my mouth shut, though I don’t know why.
Nor do I know Cammie’s reason for tiptoeing the rest of the distance to the opposite wall of the room we’re in, then pressing herself flat against it to peer discreetly out the doorway.
But I follow suit, making myself as undetectable as possible, despite the height and weight I have on my stealthy companion.
I feel a little ridiculous as I press my cheek to the rough stone wall and follow her gaze.
I see Dr. Alex in the next room over, one of the bigger and more famous of the many excavated in the villa due to its sprawling, immaculate mosaic floor that depicts a battle at sea in tiny black-and-white tiles.
Bringing my lips as close to Cam’s ear as possible, I whisper, “Why are we—”
Her hand shoots in the air and effectively silences me. I strain to hear what her mom is saying.
“…that’d kind of run its course, as these things do, so it was time for me to move on.”
My brows shoot up. There’s no way—she couldn’t be speaking directly, in front of a camera, about her past relationships, could she?
Ilaria’s response pops that balloon of hope. “I’m sure it was hard to move on from Villa di Bronzo, though, when your life had changed so much because of this place.”
“It was, absolutely. But it felt right for me, and especially for my daughter. I wanted to have other adventures with her.”
“Of course,” Ilaria agrees, and though I can’t see her, I hear the smile in her voice. “I am interested to know—why did you stay away for so long? This is your first return in eighteen, maybe nineteen years, sí?”
Even from this vantage point, a room apart and only getting one side of her face, I can see the tension that enters Dr. Alex’s smile.
“Yeah, closer to eighteen, I think. You know, I haven’t been asked that before,” she begins carefully.
“I suppose it was…well, there’s this way that places, or people, can be so tied to a particular stage of our lives, we can’t untangle one from the other.
For me, Villa di Bronzo, this beautiful countryside, Naples—they were all intrinsic to the person I was in my early to midtwenties.
And for me to be able to grow up, become the person, the mother, the archaeologist I wanted to be, I needed to close this chapter.
Needed to take space and time, find who I was past this one very transformative stage of both my career and personal life.
“I would miss it at times—when I would’ve killed for a Neapolitan pizza but my only option was Domino’s.
Or I could’ve used one of the legendary hugs from my mentor, Dr. Constantini, but had to settle for an email pep talk.
Or wished I could stroll one more time down Via Camilla, bring my daughter to see the place she was named for, where I… I had some special memories.”
Beside me, Cammie lets out a quiet gasp. But she doesn’t move from her not-so-hidden hiding place, so I stay, too.
“For quite a long time, I knew returning would cause me to fall right back into who I was then, in ways that would no longer be right for me or for Cammie. Only in the past few years, as she’s grown into a self-sufficient, independent young woman, and I’ve reached a point of feeling like I’ve achieved more than I thought possible, it’s felt like I could come back and actually enjoy all the good it brought me.
” She gives a self-deprecating laugh. “If that makes any sense outside my own mind. I could’ve given you the short answer: It’s complicated. ”
We continue to eavesdrop—for reasons that remain unclear to me—as Ilaria asks a few more questions and Dr. Alex answers, though nothing else seems as fraught as the topic of why she hasn’t returned to Villa di Bronzo before now.
When Ilaria calls “cut” and we hear the crew milling around, packing things up, I expect that Cam will make her presence known and we’ll go talk to her mom, as intended.
Instead, she puts another finger to her lips, then waves for me to follow as she slinks back along the path we took here. Once there are enough stone walls between us and the documentary folks that there’s no way they’d hear us, I say, “Okaaay, want to tell me what that was all about?”
Cammie continues speeding through rooms and hallways, floors that switch from dirt to tile to dirt-covered tile, and while I hear the occasional murmur under her breath, she doesn’t answer my question.
We’re almost all the way back to the stairs when she stops and turns to me with hands on hips.
Her eyes are blue fire again, a particular intensity I’ve only seen when she was pissed at me or had an idea she couldn’t wait to explore. I don’t think this is the former.
“Okay, hot nerd,” she says in a playful tone, but the words are serious. “You and your glasses need to help me do the math. How many Via Camillas are in this region, and how quickly could we get to all of them?”