Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Serena
The week stretches in gold and heat. I drink espresso standing up.
I eat peaches over the bathroom sink because there’s no graceful way to eat a peach that ripe in a white hotel room.
I walk streets I know and streets I don’t, letting Rome rearrange my sense of direction without making me feel lost. I sit in churches because they’re cool and quiet and because every city needs places where no one expects you to buy anything.
I watch old women choose bread with more discernment than most editors bring to commas.
The late afternoon light slides down building facades, catches on window glass, and turns the stone the color of warm honey. Rome knows exactly when it looks best. It doesn’t pretend otherwise. I respect that kind of arrogance when it’s earned.
I’m almost entirely fine. That’s the phrase I keep returning to.
Almost.
Entirely.
Fine.
There are hours when I don’t think about Ethan at all.
They arrive cleanly, without effort. A morning at the market.
A paragraph that lands right on the first try.
The first bite of a dish that knows what it’s doing.
A walk across the Ponte Sisto when the river below looks green and tired and older than everyone crossing it.
Then there are moments when his absence appears in places where his presence used to be routine.
A table for one, confirmed without apology.
A hotel bed with only my suitcase on the other side.
A menu I don’t have to tilt toward anyone else.
A joke I don’t send.
The moments don’t ruin anything. They pass through, leave fingerprints, and move on.
On the fourth night, I almost answer him.
Not because I want to, but because I’m tired.
That’s the thing people don’t say enough.
Sometimes the weakest part of you isn’t longing.
It’s fatigue. It’s the hour after a full day when your feet hurt, your hair smells like a restaurant you didn’t love, and the bed is too clean, too empty, too obviously temporary.
It’s the soft little instinct to return to what’s known, not because it was good, but because knowing requires less effort than building something new from scratch.
I sit at the desk in my hotel room with my phone in my hand and Ethan’s thread open. His last message remains there.
Ethan: Please. I know you’re in Europe. I don’t want to do this over text.
I start typing. Then I stop. There’s nothing to say that won’t invite him closer.
I delete the three words I managed and I close the thread.
I open my notes from dinner instead. The restaurant was too clever by half, but the second course had promise.
There was a fennel broth I didn’t hate. That feels more useful than giving Ethan access to my weaker hour.
At 11:46 PM, Diana messages.
Diana: Rome piece is exceptional. The carbonara paragraph especially. Don’t soften the ending.
Serena: Wasn’t planning to.
Diana: You always say that, then remove the sentence that makes people uncomfortable.
Serena: I remove sentences that are imprecise.
Diana: Sometimes discomfort is precise.
Serena: That sounds like something you’d put on a mug to frighten interns.
Diana: I have one.
I laugh alone at the desk. The sound surprises me.
Not because it’s rare. I laugh. I’m not tragic.
I know how to enjoy things, and I know how to be good company when I choose to be.
Still, there’s a difference between the laugh you produce because a moment calls for it and the one that gets out before you can manage its shape.
This one gets out. I sit there for a second with my hands on the keyboard and the city breathing through the balcony doors.
Then I answer Diana.
Serena: Please never show me that mug.
Diana: File San Sebastián notes faster than you filed Rome.
Serena: I haven’t even left Rome.
Diana: I believe in preparation.
I close the laptop.
On my last full morning, I go back to the Campo de’ Fiori before sunrise has burned the softness off the stones. The same vendor is there. He sees me and starts bagging figs without discussion.
“Today, you leave,” he says.
“Tomorrow.”
“Then today you buy more.”
“That’s very sound logic.”
“Yes,” he says.
I buy the figs.
I buy bread from a bakery where the woman behind the counter wraps it in paper and ties it with string even though I’m going to tear into it ten steps outside the door.
I buy a wedge of pecorino from a shop that smells like salt, age, and waxed rind.
I sit on the edge of a fountain and eat standing-quality food badly, with crumbs on my dress and sun warming the top of my head.
It is not elegant.
It is excellent.
A message from Sophie arrives while I’m licking fig juice from my thumb.
Sophie: Are you alive?
Serena: Yes.
Sophie: Are you eating your way through Rome like a beautiful little menace?
Serena: Also yes.
Sophie: Good. Call me later. Not optional.
Serena: You understand that adding “not optional” doesn’t change the optional nature of a thing.
Sophie: It does when I say it.
I look at the message and smile. Sophie always sounds like herself, even in text.
Warm. Bossy. Slightly theatrical. Completely impossible to ignore.
She has been my closest friend since freshman year at Columbia, when she found me in the laundry room at 2AM reading a book on restaurant history while guarding a dryer full of towels from a girl who kept trying to steal machines.
Sophie walked in wearing silk pajamas under a trench coat, carrying a mug of tea and a legal pad.
She looked at me, looked at the book, looked at the dryer.
Then she said, “You seem like someone with standards. I need your help destroying a man in my seminar.”
We’ve been friends ever since.
I text her back.
Serena: Later. I have one more lunch.
Sophie: Of course you do.
Serena: Some of us contribute to society.
Sophie: You eat pasta professionally.
Serena: Exactly.
I tuck the phone away and finish the bread. By the time I return to the hotel, my fingers smell like figs and cheese, my dress has a crumb near the hem, and Lucia looks at me as if she has been expecting this exact version of me all morning.
“You look successful,” she says.
“I am.”
“Good. Rome approves.”
“Rome is very generous with approval if you know where to eat.”
Lucia lifts one shoulder.
“That is not generosity. That is discernment.”
I point at her. “That is going in my notebook.”
“It should,” she says.
So I put it there:
Rome is not generous. It is discerning.
The line stays.
So does the crumb on my dress, because by 10:14 AM, I have three tabs open on my laptop, one unfinished paragraph on Roman restraint, and exactly six minutes before Sophie becomes impossible.
She calls at 10:20. I let it ring twice because Sophie hates being answered too quickly. She claims it makes the conversation feel “administrative,” which is rich coming from a woman who schedules emotional check-ins with the precision of a corporate merger.
I swipe to answer and set the phone against the small stack of hotel stationery near my laptop.
“Before you start,” I say, “I’m alive, I’ve eaten well, and I have not made any questionable decisions.”
Sophie’s face fills the screen a second later, framed by loose auburn waves, gold hoops, and the kind of silk robe she wears to answer emails from her West Village apartment as if a Vogue photographer might break in unannounced. Her eyes are green, sharp, and already narrowed at me.
“That depends entirely on how you define questionable,” Sophie says.
“I define it in ways that protect my peace.”
“That is not a definition, Serena. That is a legal strategy.”
“It’s been working.”
Sophie leans closer to the camera.
“Why is there a crumb on your dress?”
I look down.
The crumb remains on the black fabric near my hip, pale and incriminating.
“I had breakfast,” I say.
“You had breakfast on yourself.”
“I had excellent breakfast near myself, and some of it became ambitious.”
Sophie’s mouth curves. “Rome suits you.”
“Rome suits most people who respect carbohydrates.”
“True,” Sophie says. “Tell me everything.”
I glance at the paragraph on my laptop, then at her face on the phone.
The Roman morning sits bright behind me, pressing through the balcony doors, warming the room by degrees.
I could give her the easy version. The professional version.
The one full of food and weather and hotel details, which are all true and none of them the thing Sophie has called to hear.
So I begin there.
“I had dinner at Osteria Santa Livia my first night,” I say.
“Small room. No drama. Zucchini blossoms, tonnarelli, lamb with bitter greens. The kitchen has actual discipline.”
Sophie props her chin on her hand.
“I’m listening.”
“No, you’re waiting.”
“I can multitask.”
“You’re incapable of not multitasking.”
“That’s why I’m successful,” Sophie says.
“Continue.”
“The pasta was the kind of simple that makes you angry at everyone who’s ever made it badly,” I say.
“The pepper was integrated into the sauce instead of scattered on top like an afterthought. The lamb was better than it needed to be.”
“Was there wine?”
“Frascati Superiore.”
“Did you approve?”
“I did.”
“Did you terrify anyone with your little notebook?”
“I mildly unsettled the server.”
Sophie smiles. “Good. Keeps the youth alert.”
“She was excellent.”
“Even better. I support competent women being mildly unsettled and then rewarded.”
“I tipped correctly.”
“Of course you did,” Sophie says.
“You flirt by tipping correctly.”
“I don’t flirt with servers.”
“You flirt with systems,” Sophie says.
“It’s why you’re difficult to love and delightful to watch.”
I pick up my coffee from the desk and take a sip. It has gone lukewarm, but not enough to punish me.
“Diana liked the first two pieces,” I say.
“She should. You’re brilliant.”
“She used the word exceptional.”