Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Livia
Now . . .
The dream leaves me with Creed’s voice in my ear and my left hand shaking like it knows something I don’t.
Which is rude.
If my body is going to keep secrets from me, the least it could do is provide subtitles.
Maybe a tasteful lower-third graphic. Previously on Livia Sabine Crane’s Nervous System: two men ruined her life, one tremor moved in, and no one has explained why her heart still answers to names she refuses to say out loud.
I lie beneath the linen sheet in my apartment in Florence, rigid as a corpse with excellent skincare, staring at the ceiling while dawn nudges pale blue light through the shutters.
Outside, a scooter coughs itself awake. A delivery truck grumbles over stones old enough to have witnessed worse decisions than mine, though probably not with this much narrative commitment.
Somewhere nearby, a church bell rings once, then again, as if God also keeps office hours and would like me to begin my emotional unraveling promptly.
My left hand trembles against my stomach.
Not dramatically. Bella doesn't believe in drama before coffee. She prefers persistence. A small, judgmental shiver through my fingers and wrist, as if some invisible woman in sensible shoes has arrived with a list of concerns about my neurological compliance.
“Good morning to you too,” I whisper.
My hand keeps going.
“Lovely. We’re doing this today.”
Technically, Bella is not my left hand. Technically, Bella is the tremor that started after the accident and moved in like a tenant with no references and excellent legal protection.
Technically, naming a neurological symptom is not a coping mechanism recommended by any medical professional I have personally paid.
However, one therapist did once say, If humor helps you create distance from trauma, that can be useful, which I immediately interpreted as permission to turn my damaged nerves into a woman named Isabella.
Bella, for short. A woman who disapproves of my posture, my sleep habits, and every man I almost loved.
Especially the ones who still have rooms inside me.
I close my eyes, which is a mistake. The dark behind them is not empty. It has a voice in it.
Yeah?
One word. Barely that. More breath than language. Rough. Low. Impatient in the way only a man can be when he thinks longing is a thing he can order to sit down and behave.
It was not Moises.
It was not Italian.
It was not a stranger.
It was Creed.
My left hand curls into the sheet, obedient and quiet and frankly smug about it.
That hand has always been better at pretending.
After the accident, it became the one everyone watched.
The visible damage. The measurable problem.
Doctors could track it, test it, nod over it with grave little faces while my parents sat beside my bed, acting as if their daughter was not becoming someone else in front of them.
Someone slower. Someone breakable. Someone inconveniently alive.
Bella came later.
Bella came after the flowers died and the hospital room emptied.
After everyone stopped using words like “miracle” and started saying practical things like “long-term management.” After I realized survival didn’t come with a map, a refund, or a guarantee that the people you loved would still know where to put their hands when they reached for you.
Today, apparently, she has opinions about dreams.
“Noted,” I tell her, then push myself upright before my mind can do something reckless like remember.
Remembering is not a door. It is a trap.
One second, I am in Florence, in my too-small apartment with its old plaster walls and unreliable hot water and a coffee machine I bought because it was red and cheerful and I was trying to become a person who bought cheerful things.
Next, I am nineteen again, or twenty-one, or whatever age I was when I still believed love could be survived intact if everyone wanted it badly enough.
Creed’s voice.
Hal’s hands.
The brutal silence after.
A man who almost died and rebuilt himself into someone I no longer have the right to touch.
Another who walked away as if leaving didn’t carve the room in half.
Then me, tucked on the other side of an ocean like a difficult heirloom no one knew how to display.
Safer there. Quieter there. Less likely to make anyone confront the fact that I used to belong to them, and now I belong mostly to appointments, translations, work emails, and a tremor with excellent timing.
I learned how to live without them here.
Not beautifully. Not bravely. Please. I'm not a woman in a perfume commercial walking along the Arno in silk, healed by architecture and flattering wind.
I learned in ugly little increments. I learned by buying one fork, one knife, and one spoon because I only needed one set.
By standing in pharmacies with my phone in my good hand, translating instructions while pretending I was not terrified of misunderstanding something important.
By rehearsing sentences before appointments because needing help in another language made every ordinary task feel like proof that I had become smaller.
By figuring out which cafés didn’t mind if I sat too long over a cappuccino and pretended I was reading when really I was teaching myself not to look at the door to the past.
I learned by becoming useful.
Useful is safer than love. Useful gets invited into rooms without anyone asking what it wants.
Useful knows schedules, names, allergies, train times, donor histories, museum contacts, seating charts, crisis protocols, which ambassador’s wife refuses lilies, and how to verbally remove a man’s spine while smiling as though I am offering him sparkling water.
Useful doesn't wake up from dreams with Creed’s voice under her skin.
Useful doesn't remember the way Halston used to watch the world, like it might put its hands on me and learn, too late, what a mistake that would be.
Useful doesn't miss being wanted by two men who were never gentle with themselves, only with me.
Bella trembles harder.
I press my palm flat against my stomach, as if I can quiet her by force, as if anything in me has ever responded well to being told to behave.
“Don’t start,” I say, but my voice comes out too thin.
The apartment answers with its morning sounds. Pipes knocking in the wall. A neighbor’s window opening. A woman laughing somewhere below, bright and careless and impossible to resent, although I do give it a respectable attempt.
I swing my feet to the floor. The tile is cool beneath my soles.
My body complains immediately, because apparently, thirty seconds of emotional distress now requires a full committee review.
I sit there in the pale beginning of the day, one hand trembling, one hand gripping the mattress, trying to breathe around the fact that my heart has woken before I was ready for it.
Creed’s voice shouldn’t still undo me.
Halston’s absence shouldn’t feel like a hand at the back of my neck.
I shouldn’t be the woman they left behind.
Except . . . I am.
I am also the woman who learned how to get up anyway. Who built a life out of fragments and stubbornness and color-coded calendars. Who became so competent that no one thought to ask if competence was just grief wearing lipstick and sensible shoes.
I stand.
Bella comes with me because, of course, she does. Loyal, irritating little bitch.
“Fine,” I tell Bella, walking toward the bathroom. “But we are not crying before espresso.”
The mirror catches me before I can avoid it.
Rude of her.
There I am. Hair in a sleep-tangled knot. Pillow crease stamped into one cheek. Eyes too bright, too awake, too full of men I have no business dreaming about before sunrise. I look like a woman who has spent years convincing herself she is fine, only to have the audacity to be betrayed by my sleep.
Honestly, rude feels insufficient.
I grip the edge of the sink and stare myself down as if I am a hostile witness and also the lead attorney, which feels sufficient until I remember I'm not licensed to practice law, only an exercise in emotional avoidance with a minor in self-sabotage.
Florence glows behind me in the small bathroom window, all honeyed stone and impossible beauty, as if the city has never once cared that I came here to disappear. As if it didn’t hold me through the worst of it anyway.
This place taught me how to be lonely without dying from it.
This city didn’t save me.
It stayed.
There is a difference, and I have learned to respect it.
I learned how to make dinner for one. How to laugh at myself before the ache swallowed the whole room. How to live with my own name after theirs stopped being attached to it.
I'm not healed.
I'm not ruined.
I am, unfortunately, awake.
And somewhere inside me, Creed Lafontaine has said one word in a dream, and every careful wall I have built across an ocean has tilted toward the sound.
My apartment is small by New York standards and perfect by the standards of a woman who moved to Florence eight years ago with one suitcase, a body full of damage, and no interest in living anywhere large enough for grief to have its own room.
The bedroom has pale walls, a narrow wardrobe, a chair that collects clothes with the devotion of a museum curator, and one window overlooking a courtyard where Signora Bellini grows basil, fights with her sister, and feeds a cat she insists is not hers.
The cat, naturally, knows better.
Once I pour hot water over my wrist, I begin to move it.
Left first.
Then right.
Breathe.
One. Two. Three.
Bella eases, not enough to disappear, just enough to become manageable.
That is usually all I ask of my body now.
Not perfection. Not obedience. Just a minimum level of cooperation during working hours, social encounters, and moments when I am holding objects older and more valuable than most people’s retirement accounts.
My phone buzzes on the sink.
Moises.
Buongiorno. Coffee before lab?