Chapter Seventeen Cammie
Chapter Seventeen
Cammie
West insists that what I call his “tech wizardry” is actually “basic computer literacy,” but it’s a turn-on all the same.
One I didn’t know I had, until this guy came back into my life.
West and his six-pack and his glasses he misplaces more than he wears them and his laptop with its portable stand and ergonomic keyboard.
All of which he uses—okay, maybe not the abs, unless he was flexing under his T-shirt the whole time—to save me from running back and forth across the Italian countryside looking for my street namesake.
I forgot about the “street view” feature of online maps.
It’s a little alarming that you can type in any address in the world, and in seconds, pull up a virtual image of whatever the place looked like the last time a car with a fancy camera strapped to the roof drove by.
Alarming, but useful for the determined sleuth with limited time on her hands.
I hadn’t planned on going low-budget 007, covertly listening in on my mom’s latest interview.
But when she mentioned Via Camilla, the description immediately struck me as odd.
The story she’s always told me about my name is that she got it from a street sign, yes.
But she’d always made it sound like a random place she’d passed once when she had baby names on the brain.
This was the first I’d ever heard of Via Camilla being a place where she had “special memories,” a descriptor she noticeably struggled to get out.
I realize I could be making Mount Vesuvius out of a molehill—that she could have deliberately made the story of my name more interesting for the cameras, or stumbled over her words because she was tired from all the talking, or any number of perfectly normal explanations.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling. So we’d retreated to the library, our pseudo command center, for further investigation.
Upon a quick search, I could count on one hand the number of Via Camillas within a pretty wide radius of Villa Russo.
And thanks to West and his handy knack for remembering all that online maps can do, we only had to virtually “walk” down two of the streets before we struck gold.
“Holy shit,” I say now, standing on the sidewalk of the One True Via Camilla the day after we found it online, holding up a Polaroid from Mom’s old journal in the very spot where it was taken.
We’re in a nondescript suburb of Naples, in every way a middle ground between the rural village near Villa Russo and the bustling city center.
“Don’t you mean ‘Mamma Mia!’?” West asks. When I shoot him an unamused look, he smirks, then continues. “No, you’re right. This is a ‘holy shit’ moment. Good instincts, Agent Lovett.”
It feels like ten kinds of serendipity, coincidence, or sheer dumb luck that got us here.
As West scrolled the little cursor down this street’s virtual copy, something stood out to me and made me ask him to pause in front of a particular building.
That building—a residential one, condos or apartments or the like—had distinctive-looking balconies, almost Gaudi-esque with their curved railings and spindles, each one slightly different in shape from the others.
They hadn’t undergone any transformation, natural or man-made, in the last twenty years, nothing to make them look different than they do in the picture a young Alex Lovett snapped and saved in her journal.
A picture in which the young man she calls is seen in profile, kissing her cheek, though she’s clearly tried to fit a lot of the facade behind them in the frame. The caption she wrote in the strip of white at the bottom of the print reads “the nest.”
“I don’t know if I ever would’ve thought to search for the building,” I tell West as I continue looking from the picture to the structure and back. “I wouldn’t assume any of these guys still live at the same address they did twenty years ago, even if I’d been able to track the info down.”
Goose bumps pebble my whole body, the hair up the length of my arms raised from the surreal feeling of standing in this spot.
Feeling like it must mean something—this street, this man, my name.
I don’t know if it means he’s my father.
Or whether Mom would do something like make her daughter’s name a secret homage to the man who left them both, and keep that hidden close to her heart for all this time.
But it feels like I’m pretty damn close to getting answers.
“You said it was a place his family owned, that he was using temporarily?” West asks.
I nod. Alex’s journal actually went into surprising detail about this guy’s home, though I hadn’t thought it was worth anything to me until now.
She was obsessed with not only the funky balcony, but also the high ceilings inside, the cozy, broken-in furniture, some floral wallpaper that family lore said his great-great-grandparents, the unit’s first residents, put up.
“So there’s a chance either he or someone from the family still occupies it.
Let’s see if there are names anywhere on the exterior—like if they have those buzzers assigned to every resident’s unit. ”
I do a little hop-spin to face him, smacking my hands to his chest as I declare, “Yes, you’re a gorgeous genius, Weston Jacobs!”
He laughs, catching my wrists in his hands to keep mine where they are, then bending to press a kiss to my forehead. “And I think you’re too easily impressed, Camilla Lovett.”
We approach the front door to find that, sure enough, there is a gray-and-black box with a row of buttons down its length, and next to each button is a unit number—one through nine—and what appears to be each resident’s first initial and surname.
After checking to ensure no one is watching or, most importantly, coming into or out of the building, I pull up my phone camera and snap a few pictures of the names—good to have options, I reason in my head.
Before we head back to Villa Russo, I step out toward the street to take a few pictures of the building, then one to capture the view of Via Camilla in both directions.
It isn’t especially remarkable—not a hotbed of sightseeing with architectural wonders left and right.
But it has wide sidewalks sheltered by pretty trees, an assortment of historic and modern buildings, many with storefronts and restaurants on the ground floor, homes or offices above.
It’s got some activity but is still quiet, peaceful even.
It makes me happy, envisioning my mom walking through here all blissed out and in love. So enamored with this place—or maybe the man who occupied it—that she made it a permanent part of me.
It makes me sad, too, because whatever it may mean, she’s never shared it with me.
But I let my determination to solve this mystery overtake the feelings wrapped up in it. West and I return to the library after enjoying the lunch buffet at the villa, refueled for an afternoon of cyberstalking some strangers.
“Remember when I told you I don’t use my computer to do illegal, shady stuff ?
” West says when I describe our activities that way out loud.
“That remains true, for any authorities listening through my webcam right now. None of this is illegal or…overly invasive. Only the normal level of invasive that is the wealth of information available on the internet about all of us.”
“You’ve gotta be so fun at parties,” I say without looking up from my own computer, where I’m sprawled out on the cushy carpet.
“Hey, Pot, I’m Kettle,” he calls back, not missing a beat.
My smile is irrepressible as I think, This is love.
I start from the top of the list of names while he goes from the bottom up, each of us using whatever methods we can think of to find more information on the residents, anything that could connect them to our mysterious man. In my case, this means a lot of searches like:
L Romano Napoli
L Romano Via Camilla
L Romano Alexandra Lovett
L Romano archaeology
Ad infinitum, for all the other combinations of names and words that might be relevant to find what we need.
I imagine West, in classic tech wizard fashion, is casting a spell to open a portal that leads to a different internet than the mortal world uses, one where answers come immediately with the right series of keystrokes and a secret handshake with the devil.
Needless to say, zero out of two of us are surprised when he’s the first to say, “I think I found him.”
“What?” I spring to my feet and practically body-slam him as I jump onto the couch where he reclines. I grab for his laptop.
“Whoa, okay, hang on, ow—” he mutters as my elbow lands somewhere around his lap where an elbow probably shouldn’t be. “Holy—Give me a second, will you?”
“Sorry,” I say half-heartedly as he holds the device out of reach and, still wincing from my unintentional low blow, gingerly shifts himself so we can sit side by side. “What’d you find? I’m dying here.”
West angles his screen my way, showing a LinkedIn profile for one Luca Goedhart.
“No profile picture—red flag,” I blurt out, already chewing on my thumbnail. I’m not even a nail biter. My nerves are finding whatever outlet they can, I guess.
“Okay, slow your roll—it’s very reasonable to limit the pictures of yourself you put online. Lots of people who work in tech don’t even use social me—”
“Right, right, snap judgment retracted,” I interrupt. “Let’s get to what you know, please, thank you, love you, et cetera.”
West lets out a dramatic sigh. “Anyway, Dr. Goedhart here was going to be my last guess, to be honest, because…I mean, it’s the least Italian-looking name of them all.
But I gave him a shot, and as soon as the words professor of archaeology hit my screen, he had my full attention.
From there, I got the following—most of which, for the record, came from his LinkedIn alone, and who knew anyone still used that site these days, right? But I digress—