CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The first date is supervised by an entire fishing village.
Troy books the osteria under the name Signor Zero, which he thinks is discreet, which tells you everything about Troy Hurley’s gift for discretion.
The whole town knew by noon.
By six, the bench cardinals had relocated to the bench directly across from the osteria’s window, wearing their good coats.
Signora Bianchi developed an urgent, months-late craving for the osteria’s anchovies and is seated a couple of tables away, reading a newspaper she is holding upside down.
Rae walks me there, squeezes my arm, and says, “Remember. No numbers,” like a corner man sending a fighter back in.
Troy is already there, at a corner table, no tie, flowers nowhere in sight because he has finally learned that a man who nearly got his wife committed does not lead with peonies.
He stands when I come in. He pulls out my chair.
He does not help me into it, because I am thirty-five weeks pregnant and he has read all the books, and the books say let her lower herself, she’s not an invalid, and he is doing the visible arithmetic of not asking, and it is so endearingly strained that I take pity.
“Relax,” I say. “It’s dinner, not a deposition.”
“Everything with you is a deposition now,” he says. “I brought my own exhibits.”
And it’s strange, the first hour. It’s first-date strange, genuinely, two people leaning back from each other, testing the ice.
He tells me about the room across the lane, about the landlord’s cat that has adopted him and judges him.
I tell him about the notebook, not what’s in it, just that it exists, that it’s where the honest sentences live.
He asks about Rae’s card cheating.
I ask about his therapist.
He says she made him read the Accounting out loud, all thirty-eight pages, and he got through page twelve the first time before he had to stop, and it took four sessions to finish, and she said, at the end, well, now you know what you did.
Which doesn’t sound like much, he says, but nobody had ever made him say it all out loud, in order, in one room.
“I know the feeling,” I say. “It’s a document that makes you earn the ending.”
Over the anchovies, Signora Bianchi drops her fork, loudly, several times, to check on us.
“Your security detail is subtle,” Troy says.
“She’s the subtle one,” I say. “The cardinals across the street have a bet running. Rae’s got ten euros on you saying something unforgivable before the fish arrives.”
“What does she win if I don’t?”
“Ten euros and her faith in humanity, which is currently trading at historic lows.”
He pays the bill without a production of it.
He remembers, from somewhere in the six years he doesn’t get credit for, that I take the corner of the table because I like my back to the wall, and he takes the exposed chair without comment, and it takes me half the meal to notice he did it on purpose, and another ten minutes to decide whether it counts.
The notebook, consulted later, rules: it counts. Small, but it counts.
He is careful all evening, but not performatively careful, that’s the thing I keep watching for and not finding. He’s careful the way you’re careful carrying something heavy up stairs, attention, not theater.
When I say something sharp, and I say several sharp things, because the sharp things live in me now and come out when they want, he doesn’t absorb them like a martyr or deflect them like a lawyer. He just takes them as true and answers the next question.
We walk home the long way, along the sea path, past the bench, our bench, and he stops at my door, five flights below, and says goodnight, Liz, and doesn’t try for anything, not a hand, not a look with an invoice in it.
In the notebook: Date one. He earned a second. Account balance: one anchovy dinner, no deductions.
There are more. A second dinner, unsupervised, allegedly, though the alimentari sells Troy his groceries with a running commentary I get secondhand, and the cardinals upgrade him, after the fish course passes without incident, from that one to the American, which in bench language is practically canonization.
A third dinner where he cooks, in my kitchen, badly, gamely, following a recipe like a term sheet, and the pasta is objectively a crime and I eat two bowls, because eight months pregnant beats six years of pride.
Rae grades it a four. She grades the effort a nine. She’s a softie and a fraud and I will deny saying so.
A Sunday afternoon where we just sit on the bench and he reads his book and I read mine, and the tenant rolls between us.
A Thursday in Genoa, the therapist’s office, a beige room with a ticking clock, where we practice, I am not joking, sentences. I feel, I need, I heard you say.
The therapist, a calm woman who has clearly seen everything, says our problem is not communication, it never was, our problem is that he replaced communication with verification.
Troy writes that down. Actually writes it down, in a notebook of his own, a dark green one, and the sight of Troy Hurley taking notes on his own flaws in couple’s therapy does something to me.
On the tenth of December, Dr. Ferretti looks at the scan, looks at me, and says the baby is head-down, cooked, and large, and that I should be within fifteen minutes of a hospital, and Camogli’s five flights and my stairs are, medically speaking, a hostile environment.
So I make the decision. It’s mine to make, everybody waits while I make it, which is the new world order and I won’t pretend I don’t savor it.
“We’ll go back to the villa,” I tell Troy that evening, on the bench.
“For the birth. The hospital in Como is close, and the house is, it’s her house too.
She kicked on that terrace. I want her born in the story, not hiding from it.
” A breath. “You can come. There are terms for the house. Your room is the guest room at the far end of the east wing, and you don’t move out of it until you’re invited further in, and I mean that.
And Lina runs the house, not you. She’s the government. You’re a visiting dignitary.”
Troy sits on his end of the bench, in the dark, in December, and then he puts his face in his hands, and he cries.
Not the silent shoulder-work of the bench in November.
This is the other kind, the kind he’s clearly been holding since June, since a marble table, and it comes up out of him in a sound I’ve never heard, rough and cracked and completely without dignity.
Troy Hurley, who was raised by a woman who taught him that displays of feeling are currency only fools spend, spending everything on a bench in Camogli in front of the sea and me.
I don’t comfort him. I don’t reach over.
Comfort is a transaction and we’re not transacting yet.
But I don’t leave either. I sit at my end of the bench and let him cry it out, the whole terrible season, and the sea breathes, and the tenant kicks, and after a long time he wipes his face and says, hoarse, “Thank you,” and I don’t ask which part it’s for, because I know.
It’s for the east wing. It’s for allowing him to be there at all.
Leaving Camogli is its own small grief, it turns out.
Signora Bianchi holds my face in both hands and delivers a blessing that goes on so long the car engine stalls.
The cardinals stand, all of them, as we pull out, and one of them, the eldest, salutes, and I cry the whole first mile, and Rae, who is coming with us, obviously, permanently, she has informed us both, cries the second mile and blames the anchovies.
We move back to the villa on the fifteenth, in two cars, like a small army with a bassinet.
Lina has the house lit and warm, and she’s crying before we’re through the door and pretending it’s the dust, in a house she has personally bleached.
Troy takes the guest room at the far end of the east wing without being shown. He carries my bags in, sets them down inside my door, and steps back over the threshold like it’s a border crossing, which it is.
The nursery is the one thing I’d asked for in advance, through Lina, because term two cuts both ways: the nursery is a room the baby will be in, so it gets built in the open, together.
And Troy, it turns out, has thoughts about cribs, informed, sourced, safety-rated opinions, delivered with the passion other men reserve for football.
He built the damn thing himself, or tried to.
I find him at ten at night with an Allen key and the instructions translated into three languages he speaks and one he’s guessing at, with the expression of a man performing surgery on a very small patient, because, he says, the last crib went to the parish twins and those girls deserve it, but this one, this one he wanted to build with his hands, at least once, so he could be sure.
“There’s a screw left over,” he admits, at midnight.
“There’s always a screw left over,” I say. “That’s what the books say. I read one. It’s called forgiveness, spare parts edition.”
He looks at me then, across the half-built crib, and doesn’t say anything wise, and neither do I.
The ring comes up on the twentieth. I put it on the table between us after dinner, in its box, the box that started the war by moving one inch to the left.
“I’ve been carrying this since November,” I say. “I don’t know what it is anymore. It’s not nothing. It’s not what it was. I don’t want to melt it down and I don’t want to put it on. So I’m putting it on the table, and I’m telling you I don’t know.”
Troy looks at the box for a long time. He doesn’t touch it. He doesn’t reach, he doesn’t take it back, he doesn’t slide it toward me with a speech.
“It’s yours,” he says. “Whatever you decide. If it never comes off the table, it’s yours on the table. I gave it to you the first time with no conditions, and then I spent the spring teaching you what conditions feel like. So. No conditions. It’s yours.”
“There’s one thing,” I say. “If I ever wear a ring again, I want a new stone. This one saw too much. I want one that chose us, not one that watched.”
Troy nods slowly, and something goes through his face, hope, ruthlessly suppressed, the hope of a man who has learned that hope is a thing you are granted, not a thing you bring.
“A new stone,” he repeats. “Noted. No conditions. Whenever.” A pause. “If ever.”
In the notebook, on the twenty-third of December, eight days before she’s due: The house is warm. The crib has one screw spare and holds anyway, which the notebook flags as an obvious metaphor and includes anyway, because the notebook is honest, not original.
The ring is on the table. He’s in the east wing. She’s head-down and armed.
And underneath: For the first time since May, I am not braced. I’d forgotten what unbraced felt like. It feels like the house did before everything, except this time I built it myself, out of terms, and the doors open from the inside.