Chapter 8
Nico is walking so rapidly it’s hard to keep up.
He’s lost in his own thoughts as we make our way through another olive grove.
Luce noticed us the minute we came out of the mill and bounded over, thrilled to tag along.
Nico still reaches out to pet Luce every time he jumps up, but his mind is elsewhere.
The grove clears, and we start walking up a hill covered in untamed grass.
It’s a gradual slope, and it’s hard to make out what exactly is waiting for us at the top.
But based on the way Luce is hopping excitedly and running ahead and then back, it’s clear we’re going to a stop they’ve been to many times.
As we approach the top of the hill, I start to make out something at the edge, but my eyes don’t really believe it until we’re standing in front of it.
“This is . . . a couch,” I say, looking at this old-fashioned, weathered, leather-ish beige couch perched on the top of a hill.
“Yup,” Nico says as he plops down onto it, Luce following immediately into his lap.
He brings his bag up, reaches in, and pulls out a small clear bottle, its contents a fiery red.
He opens the top and hands it to me. I take a sip—it’s a premade Campari and soda, fizzy bitter perfection bottled in glass.
He pulls out another one for himself and downs it practically in one go. It looks so small in his large hands.
I turn around and sit down, suddenly realizing why we’re here.
At the top of this hill you can see the sun starting to set rose pink across a sky with clouds that look like painted wisps.
The grass in front of us is slowly absorbed in the distance by olive trees and then more wavy hills, one of which contains Manciano perched high.
I wonder if, when I’m looking out my apartment window, I’m staring directly at Nico’s couch hill.
The view is stunning, even if it’s a little incongruous to be sitting on a piece of indoor furniture plopped at the top of a grassy knoll.
“It’s quite a different seating arrangement than in town, where all the old people just pull out plastic chairs,” I finally say. He chuckles at the thought but doesn’t disagree. “How did you even get a couch up here?”
“I was going to get rid of it anyway, and a friend helped me carry it up,” he says casually, as though walking with a couch up a hill is no big deal. “It’s serene up here.”
He grabs another drink from his bag and sips it more slowly this time, facing out toward the sunset and not looking at me. I always find his stillness disarming. I’m all movement, but he’s just as strong by being still.
“You know,” he says, “one thing I love about these trees is that every year their yield is different, and there’s no rhyme or reason.
Sometimes, only twenty meters apart, you’ll see one tree with tons of olives and another with practically none.
The weather is the same, so who knows why it happens.
It’s its own little mystery; it’s kind of romantic knowing not everything has a reason. ”
I wait before responding. Whatever happened with Tommaso is clearly still roiling inside him, and I know enough to give him the space to decide what he wants to tell me.
He absentmindedly pets Luce. “The boar hunting is impossible. There are all these weird old Italian laws—or maybe Tuscan laws, I suppose—that give ridiculous rights to hunters. If you walk on my property without a gun, I can obviously have you arrested for trespassing. But with a gun, in hunting season, you have a right to be in any area where the municipality decides you can hunt. Boars love digging around olive trees, so our land always falls into a boar area. During harvest, the boars stay away because there’s too many people, but in the summer you see them a lot.
There’s a few weeks in the summer where the hunters can come, and they’re allowed onto the land with like twenty or twenty-five people.
And in recent years they do it at night because they think it’s easier to surprise the boars. ”
“What does that have to do with Gia?” I ask, curious how this became about her.
Nico lets out a deep sigh. “What doesn’t have to do with Gia?
” His lips curve with a sad smile as he finally tilts his head toward me, and I get that sense again, when our eyes catch, of something intangible roiling between us.
But he looks away again as quickly as he started.
“No, it’s not her fault at all, really. For years she’s been sleeping outside with her cows and a rifle whenever they come on her land. ”
“I’m sorry?” I say, suddenly turning my whole body toward him because that wasn’t where I thought this was going.
“About a decade ago, the hunters accidentally shot one of her cows. Her farm has always had cows, and she treats them like her children. She loves them.” His laugh is wistful.
Seeing him around Luce makes me think he could understand anyone’s attachment to any animal.
“So since then, she’s slept outside with her rifle.
Only I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but she’s getting quite arthritic. ”
I’ve certainly noticed the way she has to take a moment for her hands when she’s working pasta dough. But since I never knew her before, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that her current rapid speed has been slowed down. Maybe that’s my error for underestimating anything about Gia.
“Her doctor said this year she can’t sleep outside the way she’s been.
He’s been saying it offhandedly for years, but he really put a fine point on it this year.
So over the last few months, Gia did everything she could think of to get our land made into a reserve, so the hunters couldn’t come.
But they fought it. Bitterly. She accused them of a lot of underhanded tactics, and it got pretty ugly. ”
“I certainly wouldn’t want to go into battle against Gia.”
Another one of his small smiles curls up again, and he rubs his hand through his hair, tousling it and letting it look even more wild.
“No, neither would I. Tommaso doesn’t care about anything but the rich people he brings up on expeditions from Rome, so it’s hard to know whether he defeated Gia fairly or not.
But the result was the same. Starting next week, they’ll be back. ”
“And what’s Gia going to do?” I ask.
Nico cringes. “It’s not so much Gia, as me.”
I nod, the realization sinking in. “You’re taking over for her,” I say. It’s a statement without question, because I already know the kind of man Nico is. He’s not going to let Gia hurt herself.
“I am,” he says quietly. “And I guess Gia just told Tommaso that. He was counting on her bowing out this year and having unfettered access to the land. But having a person sleeping against a tree with a rifle isn’t exactly appealing to a bunch of tourists looking to sneak up on an animal in a place they want to pretend is fully wild. ”
“I’ll do it with you,” I say, surprising myself as the words tumble out of my mouth. But the minute they do, I know I want to. I want to show up for Gia.
He pauses. “You don’t have to do that.” I hate the resignation in his tone. It bolsters the thought.
“I’m stubborn as all hell,” I say. “I normally run a restaurant on my feet seven days a week. I can handle a little bit of sleeping outside.”
“But you don’t need to.”
“I feel like I’m part of this now,” I admit.
I’m surprised how true that already feels after such little time.
“Gia has taken me in at a . . . well, a particularly hard time for me.” I pause, but Nico doesn’t say anything.
He’s clearly not surprised—the town talks, after all—but he gives me the same space to finish that I gave him.
It’s discomforting, the ease I feel in this town, with these people.
But this solitude up on the hill is doing something to my insides—like this is a place where secrets can be shared without consequence.
“I’m trying to just go about my days here like this is all a normal break for me, but the truth is, I haven’t really faced anything happening at home. I ran away from my restaurant burning down and a breakup. I’m waiting for all of it to wallop me in the face at some point.”
“And that point is going to be sitting outside in the middle of the night, carrying a rifle?” he ribs, an attempt to lighten the burden of the words I’m spitting out.
“No,” I retort. “The point is that Gia took me in. She had no reason to trust me, other than Anita said she should. She gave me a job and found me an apartment and kicks my ass every day. So I want to help her.”
“Why do you like someone kicking your ass every day, if you don’t mind my asking?
” For someone who’s spent a lot of our conversation tonight looking away—as though if we catch each other’s eyes again, we might have to reexamine whatever almost happened back at the mill—he’s watching me now.
That earnest face, wanting to understand.
“Tough comes easily to me,” I admit. “Gia keeps pointing out that I’m the youngest, so she thinks I had to be scrappy.
But I think I always would’ve been scrappy.
” I look back out at the view. It’ll be too much to admit if I have to see how my words affect his expression.
“It’s always been easier for me if things are clear cut.
I rowed crew in high school and college, which was really the first time I felt like I belonged somewhere.
It started because I was tall, but eventually the rhythm took over my life.
I fed on it—the competition, the strength, the discipline.
Being a chef is like an extension of that.
I’ve always thrived on hard work. And I’ve always sought out environments that didn’t mind women like that. ”
“Women like what?” he asks softly. Luce moves to put his head on my lap, and it’s like he’s an extension of Nico, reaching out when things are hard to say.