14. Senna
— ? —
Senna
He doesn’t come back to the studio.
I keep expecting him to - every time the door opens, every time I hear footsteps in the hallway, I brace myself for his face to appear.
But instead, what appears is a paper bag from the café three blocks over, left with the assistant along with a note in his handwriting: You forget to eat when you’re working. You always did.
The first time it happens, I’m annoyed. The second time, I’m suspicious.
The third time, on a Thursday afternoon when I’ve been in the booth with Matteo for six hours and my stomach is eating itself, I actually open the bag and find exactly what I would have ordered if I’d remembered to order anything - a panini with prosciutto and fresh mozzarella, still warm, and a small bottle of sparkling water.
“Someone really wants to get back in your good graces,” Matteo observes, watching me eat.
“Someone is trying.”
“Is it working?”
“I don’t know yet.”
And that’s the truth. I don’t know what to do with this version of Rocco, the one who leaves food without demanding anything in return, who texts me once a day with something small and specific - remembering a song I mentioned loving years ago, asking if I’ve tried the new bakery on Via dei Serragli, telling me he heard a bird singing outside our window this morning and it made him think of me.
Our window. Like the house is still ours. Like I still live there.
“Can I ask you something?” Matteo says, and his voice is careful in a way that makes me pay attention.
“Sure.”
“The guy who keeps sending food. That’s your husband, right? The musician?”
“Technically, yes.”
“And you’re getting divorced?”
“Also technically yes.”
He’s quiet for a moment, fiddling with the cord of his headphones. “Do you want to be?”
The question catches me off guard. “What?”
“Getting divorced. Do you actually want to? Or is it just-” He gestures vaguely. “-something that’s happening to you?”
I think about that for longer than I probably should. “I want to stop being invisible,” I say finally. “I want to stop being the person who disappears so someone else can take up space. Whether that means divorce or something else, I don’t know yet.”
“That’s fair.” He nods, like this is a perfectly reasonable answer. “For what it’s worth, I can’t imagine you being invisible. Every time you walk into the booth, it’s like - I don’t know. Like the whole room gets clearer.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I take another bite of my panini and change the subject.
***
The next week, Elena calls to say that Rocco has asked for my professional opinion on something.
“My what now?”
“Your professional opinion. He’s working on new material - without Fiorella, apparently - and he wants to know if you’d be willing to listen to some demos. Give him notes. That kind of thing.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m relaying the message. What you do with it is up to you.”
I spend three days not responding, which is childish and I know it, but I’m not ready to hear his music again. I’m not ready to be pulled back into his creative world after spending so long standing outside it.
On the fourth day, he texts me directly.
Rocco: I know you’re busy with Matteo. I’m not asking you to come back or work with me. I just want to know what you think. About one song. That’s all.
Rocco: You can say no. I’ll understand.
Rocco: I just miss your ear. I always trusted your ear more than anyone’s.
I stare at the messages for a long time. Then I type back: Send it.
The file arrives thirty seconds later, like he’d been waiting with his finger over the send button. I download it to my phone and listen to it that night, alone in my small apartment with a glass of wine and the window open to the Florence evening.
It’s rough. Unfinished. The kind of demo you make when you’re still trying to figure out what you’re trying to say. But there’s something in it - a melody that wants to be something, a lyric that’s reaching for honesty but not quite getting there.
I listen to it three times before I text him back.
Senna: The bridge is too busy. You’re overwriting because you’re scared of the silence. Let the silence happen.
His response comes immediately.
Rocco: You’re right. You’re absolutely right. Thank you.
Senna: The melody in the chorus is good. But you’re fighting it in the second verse. It wants to go somewhere and you keep pulling it back.
Rocco: Where does it want to go?
Senna: Down. Not up. You’re reaching for something triumphant when the song is actually about grief.
A long pause. Then:
Rocco: I don’t know how to write about grief.
Senna: You’ve been living in it for eighteen months. Start there.
Another pause.
Rocco: Can I ask you something?
Senna: You can ask.
Rocco: The song from the showcase. The one Fiorella brought me. I texted you about it before - the page I found with handwriting I’m almost certain is yours. Do you know anything about it?
My heart stops.
He’s asking. He’s actually asking - directly, openly, like he wants to know the truth instead of just accepting whatever story makes his life easier.
I could lie. I could deflect. I could tell him I don’t know what he’s talking about.
Instead, I type: Yes.
Rocco: Yes you know something about it?
Senna: Yes. I know where it came from.
Rocco: Where?
I stare at the screen, watching the cursor blink. And then I type the words I’ve been holding back for weeks.
Senna: It’s mine. I wrote it. Years ago, before we met. It was in my songbook - the one that went missing.
The pause that follows is so long I start to think he’s not going to respond at all.
Then: Can I call you?
I pick up on the first ring.
“Tell me everything,” he says, and his voice sounds wrecked. “From the beginning.”
“I wrote that song when I was twenty-two. Before the conservatory showcase, before I ever met you. It was in my notebook - the one with the torn corner, the coffee stain on page forty-three.”
“The one you kept on the piano bench.”
“Yes. And then Fiorella moved in, and a few weeks later it was gone. I thought I’d misplaced it. I spent hours looking.”
“Why didn’t you tell me it was missing?”
The question lands harder than it should. “Would you have noticed? Would you have cared? You were so deep in the collaboration by then, Rocco. You barely looked at me.”
Silence on the line. I can hear him breathing.
“Did you know?” I ask, and my voice comes out smaller than I want it to. “When you were singing it - did any part of you recognize it?”
“No.” The word sounds like it costs him something. “God, Senna, no. I swear to you, I had no idea. Fiorella brought me the pages and said she’d been working on it for months. I believed her. I wanted to believe her because the song was good and I was desperate.”
“You never asked where it came from? Never questioned why it sounded different from everything else she’d shown you?”
“I should have. I know I should have. But I was so focused on the fact that the music was finally flowing again-” He breaks off. “That’s not an excuse. There is no excuse.”
“No. There isn’t.”
“I shut you out. For months, I shut you out, and if I’d just asked you to help, if I’d just looked at what was right in front of me-”
“But you didn’t.”
“I didn’t.” His voice cracks. “And that’s on me. Not just Fiorella - me. I made it easy for her. I created the conditions where this could happen because I was too proud and too scared to turn to my own wife.”
I close my eyes and let the admission settle into me. He’s not deflecting. He’s not making Fiorella the sole villain while positioning himself as an innocent victim. He’s owning it - the exclusion, the blindness, all of it.
It doesn’t make it hurt less. But it makes it real.
“I need time,” I say. “To figure out what this means. What any of it means.”
“I know. Take whatever you need.”
“And I need to verify some things on my own. Not because I don’t believe you, but because-”
“Because you’ve spent too long taking my word for things that turned out to be wrong.”
“Yes.”
“That’s fair. That’s more than fair.” He pauses. “Can I ask - do you have proof? Of when you wrote it?”
“I might. Old emails I sent to myself with photos of the pages. I’ll have to dig through my archives.”
“Will you share them with me? When you find them?”
“Maybe. If I decide you’ve earned it.”
Another pause. Then, quietly: “I’ll earn it. However long it takes.”
I don’t respond to that. I’m not ready to give him hope I’m not sure I feel.
“I have to go,” I say instead.
I hang up and sit in the dark for a long time, thinking about stolen songs and lost years and the way his voice sounded when he said tell me everything - like someone waking up from a nightmare they didn’t know they were having.
He didn’t know.
He really didn’t know.
It doesn’t change anything. But somehow, it changes everything.