Chapter 6 #2
But then, the door opened, and in came Darcy, bringing with her plenty of stories about her toddler, her growing baby in her belly, and her husband.
Sam melted into those stories, grateful to have something else to talk about.
Rachelle played her part, praying for the evening to end soon. In time, it did.
The following morning, Sam drove her to the airport, kissed her goodbye, and left.
Rachelle sobbed the whole way back to Rome on the airplane.
She wondered if she was making a horrible mistake.
But as soon as she landed, her girlfriends, Roberta and Malina, picked her up from her apartment and took her dancing.
Rachelle felt a richness and a vitality in the city that she couldn’t ignore.
It felt like the opposite of all that anger and coldness on Nantucket Island.
That night, she spotted someone across the club, someone dark-eyed and muscular who walked directly over to her and started to dance with her.
He didn’t ask permission. Rachelle felt her body echoing his.
She felt the heat of his breath on her lips.
Before the song was finished, he asked her if he could kiss her.
She was drunk on wine and jet-lagged and brokenhearted from what her mother said, and was willing to do anything he asked.
They kissed for ten minutes, there on the dance floor, before ducking into the night.
He wanted to smoke in the alleyway, and she stood with him, talking in a mix of English and Italian.
He asked who she was, what she did. She said she was Rachelle, an American.
She was a sous chef. He laughed and said, “I’m a chef, too. ”
This wasn’t hard to believe in Rome. Everyone was a cook, professionally trained or otherwise. But he soon went into his background, how he’d studied in Paris, London, and New York. Rachelle was intrigued. They even knew some of the same people. “How is this possible?” she asked.
“Rome is small,” he told her.
“The world is small,” she said.
His name was Riccardo.
Rachelle didn’t go home with him that first night.
She felt too messy, too sad. But Riccardo asked for her number and called her the very next day.
She was on her way to Diana’s kitchen, fixing her hair for a wild night of fire and oil and panic.
Riccardo said he was on his way to his job, too.
He worked as a sous chef for another chef Rachelle had met before, a friend of Diana’s.
Rachelle melted into his beautiful language and his pledges to take her out when they both had time.
She loved that they had similar schedules.
She loved that he loved food as much as she did—not only for how it tasted, but for what it could do, scientifically.
Throughout that winter and into spring, Rachelle watched herself fall deeper and deeper in love with Riccardo.
She was amazed at his intellect, his whip-smart humor, and his agility with a saucepan or a skillet.
On their days off, they showed off the recipes they were cultivating or went out of the city to pick mushrooms and basil, or drank wine in bed, falling deeper in love with every sip.
It wasn’t till Rachelle had been dating him for four months that she figured out how wealthy his family was.
She was surprised, as Riccardo seemed to live a similar life to hers in the city.
It was as though he refused his parents’ money. She didn’t ask.
Riccardo didn’t ask much about her family, either.
Had he, she might have told him that she, her sister, and her mother were currently growing apart.
Since Christmas, she’d called them less and less frequently, and she hadn’t made arrangements to visit home anytime soon.
This saddened her and darkened her mood when she let it.
But she felt so enraptured with Riccardo, so distracted, that she allowed more and more time to pass.
After all, couldn’t they pick up the phone just the same as she could? Couldn’t they call her if they really wanted to talk to her?
It became a sort of competition. Who would be the one to keep their love together?
By the time Darcy had her new baby, Rachelle felt as though Darcy were a sort of stranger, a cousin she’d lost touch with many years ago.
Darcy sent a photograph of herself, Steven, and the new baby at the hospital, Darcy bleary-eyed, the baby like a tiny red cabbage.
Rachelle burst into tears in the bathroom of Riccardo’s place, but emerged clear-eyed and eager to eat the pasta he’d made for them that evening.
“It’s delicious!” she told him, gushing with love. “I can’t believe how lucky I am.”
It was that day that they dreamed up the idea of Rachelle’s restaurant. “You’ll be my sous chef,” she told him, because she couldn’t imagine a world where she wasn’t the boss of her own place.
Riccardo raised his hands. “You’re the boss, Boss!”
Now, so many years after Darcy’s second baby’s birth, so many years after Rachelle had last felt loved and protected by her Coleman family, Rachelle bolted to her feet and continued her run.
Her legs burned beneath her, and her eyes shed water.
She ran until her heart pounded and her ears tingled.
She ran until she could almost, almost forget how tormented she really felt.