Chapter 8
Four Years Ago
When Aurora was eighteen years old, she graduated from her Roman high school with honors.
She was third in her class, a bright and beautiful individual whom all her teachers suggested would go on to do great things.
At the time, of course, Aurora wasn’t entirely sure what they meant by “great” things.
Although she knew how to talk about her future in a way that people responded to, in a way that made her seem intelligent and driven, her real plan was to have an amazing life.
She planned to surprise herself at every turn.
That night, Roberto, Lorelei, Pino, Aurora, and Nadia went out to dinner to celebrate Aurora’s accomplishments.
Unlike usual, they dined at a restaurant that did not belong to Roberto and Lorelei, one with a new and exciting Roman chef whom Roberto wanted to meet—and maybe even rob for his own kitchen.
They were given the table of honor—not because of Aurora’s graduation, but because of Roberto’s prestige in the restaurant business—and loaded up on all the finest appetizers and bottles of wine.
In Italy, eighteen-year-olds were allowed to drink wine legally, and Aurora found her thoughts swimming as she listened to her mother’s laughter and Nadia’s stories and the hum and buzz of the greater restaurant.
Frequently, her father leaned across the table and asked her about the wine and about what she was eating. “Describe it to me in detail,” Roberto said, because he was often thrilled at how precise Aurora could be with words and how delicate her palate was.
“She’s her papa’s daughter,” Lorelei said, grinning in a way that made Aurora sad.
It was true that Aurora had always been Roberto’s favorite.
It meant that Aurora and Lorelei had never been as close as Lorelei was with Nadia and Pino.
But even at age eighteen, Aurora knew this was life: complications between family members, things you couldn’t explain.
She knew Lorelei didn’t talk to most of her family members back in the States.
Lorelei refused to discuss it, as though it was too much to bear.
“Tell us, Aurora,” her father said now, raising his glass of wine. “Tell us what you want to become.”
Nadia, Pino, and Lorelei looked at Aurora, captivated by her.
She was their rising star. Pino, who was two years older, was already at university, studying the sciences, but she’d heard that he had failed one of his classes last semester and that their parents weren’t proud.
There was a hunched look to Pino’s shoulders, as though he didn’t want to be looked at too much.
Aurora spread her hands across the white tablecloth and steadied herself. “You know that I applied to many, many universities,” she said.
“Cambridge. Oxford. The Sorbonne,” her father listed, smiling. She’d gotten into all of them. “Which one will you choose?”
“Don’t forget the American universities,” Lorelei chimed in. “Yale and Harvard aren’t bad, either.”
Aurora laughed gently. Of course, versions of herself went to all these schools. There were timelines in which she went on to become a doctor, a lawyer, or a scientist. There were times when she made her parents terribly proud.
Aurora had come to understand in her eighteen years of life that she wasn’t an average academic.
She was an artist. She was here to create reflections of humanity and help people see themselves fully and clearly in a world that was so often distracted by money and time.
She’d gotten the art award every year at school, going back forever.
But she’d never fully expressed her desire to pursue art to her parents—not until now.
“I’ve decided where I’m going in the fall,” she said, grateful that her voice didn’t warble at all. “I'm going to the Berlin University of Art and Design.”
At this, her father’s jaw dropped with surprise. Nadia and Pino looked at one another, panicked. But Lorelei, only Lorelei, clasped her hands together and whispered, “Oh, honey. Of course. You’re an artist.”
Aurora smiled and nodded. “I want to pursue art seriously. I want to give it my best shot. And the professors I spoke with in Berlin are incredible. They’ve broken new boundaries.
They’re on the cutting-edge of what it means to make art in the twenty-first century.
” Aurora’s eyes flickered over to her father, who continued to wear a funny expression.
Lorelei reached over to take Aurora’s hand. “You’re going to be incredible, Aurora.”
Slowly, Roberto nodded. His eyes glinted. “Harvard. Cambridge. The Sorbonne. None of them were good enough for you?”
Aurora raised her shoulders. “My parents are artists,” she reminded them, speaking of her mother’s storied music past as a musician and her father’s exciting career as a top chef. “I come by it honestly.”
“She really does,” Lorelei said, smiling in a way that made Aurora feel more connected to her mother than she had in years.
“What will be your medium?” Roberto returned part of his attention to his food, wrapping pasta around and around his fork.
“Maybe film,” Aurora said, thinking of her Grandmother Francesca’s famous filmmaker father. “Or maybe painting? I’ve always loved painting. It’s too bad that I never really took to piano, like you, Mama. But not everybody has what you have.”
Lorelei waved her hand, but Roberto interjected.
“Your mother was a singular talent,” he said firmly. “I’ve never seen anyone take the stage like she did. Not before nor since.”
Lorelei’s smile waned the slightest bit. Aurora felt the weight of the past tense in her father’s sentences, but she knew better than to call him out.
It was, of course, a mystery in their family as to why Lorelei had stopped playing the piano. It felt too personal to ask about. Aurora imagined she would never get to know.
Rather than hang around Rome all summer, waiting for the Berlin art semester to begin, Aurora went traveling by herself.
She’d worked for years at her father’s restaurants as a server, and she’d saved up a great deal so that she could take buses and trains all over Europe.
Her parents had shown her their version of the world—their high-class version—but she decided to take control, going to dive bars in Athens, exploring caves in Spain and France, trying her best to master other languages, and meeting travelers in hostels from all over the world.
Everywhere she looked, Aurora was inspired to make art. She kept a little notebook with her at all times so that she could write down her ideas or sketch things out. She wanted to charge into the first semester at her Berlin art school and show her professors what she was all about.
Maybe because of how busy she was, and maybe because of how difficult it was to own three restaurants across Italy, Aurora’s conversations with her parents became fewer and farther between.
Nadia and Pino still texted her pretty often, but they were busy with their own lives.
Aurora felt an isolation that she’d never encountered before, one that she knew she needed to become more familiar with if she was going to be an artist in Berlin.
She couldn’t lean back on the comforts of home, not if she wanted to grow.
Aurora returned to Rome the week before her move to Berlin to pack the last of her things and arrange for everything to be shipped to Germany.
While there, she experienced her parents’ summertime chaos and hardly saw her brother and sister.
The night before her departure, they all went out to dinner, but Roberto had to leave the table halfway through to deal with a problem in his Sardinian restaurant, and Lorelei seemed distracted and upset.
“What’s going on with them?” Aurora asked her brother and sister later on, at home.
Pino and Nadia shrugged.
“It’s been a weird summer,” Nadia explained.
“I don’t think they’re getting along very well,” Pino said.
This was the first time Aurora had ever been frightened that her parents might divorce. She’d never imagined it before.
But she couldn’t dwell on her parents’ problems for long.
Soon, she was getting off the train in Berlin and wheeling her suitcases to a waiting taxi, which took her to her pint-sized studio apartment in the quaint neighborhood of Friedrichshain.
Once there, she decorated the place to her liking and prepared for her first week of classes.
Little did she know, her life was about to change forever.
On her first day of classes at her Berlin art school, Aurora met her professor Sebastian.
He was in his mid-twenties, maybe, but he’d already made a name for himself in the Berlin and European art worlds, as he’d made a series of paintings and sculptures that attacked what was going on in the government and actually got the conversation going in a different direction.
He was proof that art was a living thing, that it could change things politically and emotionally.
He was also sensationally handsome.
Aurora had never seen anyone like him. He was maybe six-foot-four, with broad shoulders and blond hair and an air about him that felt grounding yet also made you feel like you could do anything you set your mind to.
When Aurora showed him the sketches and paintings and notes she’d made over the summer, he sat with them for a full half hour, going over what she’d done, then talked with her for more than four hours about how she envisioned her first semester at the university.
“What do you want to accomplish? Because I want to help you get there.”
Aurora had never been taken so seriously before.
At the end of her first week, Aurora called home. She was sitting at her kitchen table, drinking tea and watching the rain outside her window. On her screen, in a video chat, sat her mother and father, both of them looking drowsy and anxious.