Chapter 2 #4
“To Claudia,” the friend says in Italian, her voice thick with wine and affection.
Claudia waves a hand. “To me, yes, but briefly.”
Everyone laughs.
The phone buzzes again.
I look down.
Two messages this time.
Ethan: I miss you.
Ethan: I miss us.
There it is. The softest version of the hook.
I sit back in my chair and look at the words until they lose shape.
Around me, the terrace continues with no interest in my small digital inheritance from New York.
Forks touch plates. A waiter moves through the tables with a bottle of red tucked against his forearm.
Claudia accepts a slice of cake with the air of a woman granting a favor.
I miss us.
I almost laugh.
Not because it’s funny, but because it is so beautifully incomplete.
People say they miss us when what they mean is they miss the version of themselves they got to be beside someone who loved them before the damage.
Ethan misses the reflected self. The good man.
The charming partner. The ambitious boyfriend with the sharp, pretty food critic beside him at dinners where people asked what I thought of the wine and then waited to decide whether they agreed.
He misses being seen by me before I saw too much.
I pick up the phone. For once, my thumb does not hover. I do not open the thread. I simply turn the phone over, screen-down against the white tablecloth, and finish the peach.
***
The next morning, Rome is pale and already warm when I close my suitcase.
I move through the room with the tidy discipline of departure.
Toiletries packed. Chargers coiled. Notebook in the front pocket of my leather tote.
Passport in the zippered compartment. Laptop charged.
Train ticket ready. Hotel room checked twice because I have no interest in donating earrings to Europe.
At 8:22 AM, I stand at the desk and look around.
The bed is made, though not as neatly as housekeeping would manage. The curtains are open. The balcony doors are closed. The small ceramic dish beside the lamp is empty. For six days, this room has held my clothes, my notes, my sleep, and the careful silence around everything I have not answered.
It looks untouched now. That is the strange intimacy of hotel rooms. You can live inside them completely and leave almost no evidence.
My phone lights on the desk. For one second, I think it’s Ethan again.
It is Sophie.
Sophie: Train day. Text me when seated. Not when boarding. Seated. I know you.
I smile.
Serena: Controlling.
Sophie: Observant.
Serena: Fine.
Sophie: Safe travels, beautiful menace.
I put the phone in my bag. Lucia is waiting at the front desk when I come down. My bill is printed, folded, and ready. The taxi waits outside because Lucia has clearly decided I cannot be trusted with time.
“You will come back,” she says as I sign.
It is not a question.
“Yes,” I say.
“Good. Next time, not three years.”
“I’ll try to be less neglectful.”
“Try harder than that,” Lucia says.
I take the receipt and slide it into my tote.
“Thank you for everything.”
“You are welcome,” she says.
“Eat well in Spain.”
“I intend to.”
She comes around the desk before I can reach for my suitcase. For one alarming second, I think she might hug me. Instead, she adjusts the luggage tag so it lies flat against the handle.
“There,” Lucia says. “Better.”
I look down at it, then back at her.
“Yes,” I say. “It is.”
The taxi ride to Roma Termini is all morning glare and traffic.
The driver plays the radio low. A woman on a scooter passes us with a dog sitting between her feet as if this is a perfectly reasonable transportation arrangement.
Men unload crates outside cafés. Tourists drag suitcases over stone with loud, uneven wheels.
Rome keeps moving because leaving does not make you important to a city.
It simply makes you one more person who has been briefly held and then released.
At the station, I find my platform, buy an espresso I do not need, and stand beneath the departure board while destinations flicker and settle overhead. Milan. Florence. Naples. Venice. Names becoming tracks, times, motion.
San Sebastián requires changes. Rome to Milan.
Milan to Paris later. Then onward. The route is inefficient in the way European travel can be inefficient when you insist on trains because you like the honest progress of land beneath you.
Airports erase distance too cleanly. Trains let you watch the leaving happen.
I board at 9:12 AM. My seat is by the window, as requested, facing forward, with a small table and enough room for the laptop.
I slide my suitcase into the rack, place my tote beside me, and set the notebook on the table.
The carriage smells like coffee, fabric, and metal warmed by morning sun.
A man across the aisle is already asleep with his mouth open. I envy him slightly.
The train pulls out at 9:31 AM, one minute late, which feels restrained enough to forgive.
Rome begins to move past the window. At first, the city holds on.
Apartment blocks. Graffiti. Laundry. Walls.
Stations. Brief flashes of people waiting on platforms with their faces turned toward other destinations.
Then the edges loosen. The buildings thin.
The light opens. The Italian countryside begins to appear in gold and green, rolling away beneath a sky so clear it looks almost polished.
My phone buzzes once as the train gathers speed. I look down. Ethan again.
Ethan: Please don’t shut me out like this.
I read it without opening the thread.
The train slips past a cluster of cypress trees. For a moment, my chest tightens around something old and dull. Not longing. Not love. Not even grief in its original form. Just the hollow place where habit used to live, still shaped like the thing that left it.
I put the phone face-down on the table. There is no clean victory in not answering.
That is the part no one tells you. Silence can be strong and still hurt.
Leaving can be right and still require both hands.
A life can be better without someone and still echo in the places where that person once stood.
I let the hollow sit there. Then I open my notebook. The first blank page waits. I write the date. The route. The time. The weather. The first practical details of the next city before it has a chance to become intimidating.
The countryside moves past the window in long strokes of green and gold. Vineyards. Farmhouses. A road curving between fields. A church tower rising from a small town I will never know except as a shape against the morning.
I’m good at this. I’m good at leaving. I’ve always been good at leaving.
The hollow in my chest is still there, but it is less insistent than it was when I landed. Rome has not healed it. Rome has kept me occupied while I remembered that my hands still know what to do.
I open my laptop and get to work.