Chapter Six
Jill
Rome met me with a heat that had weight to it, thick and gold in the late afternoon, pressing against my skin the moment the cabin door opened, and I stood outside the terminal at Fiumicino with my one bag and my camera and no plan beyond the hotel Mallory had booked, watching taxis idle in a line that seemed to stretch toward the horizon, and something close to panic settled into my chest along with the exhaustion of the flight, a low hum of fear I hadn't fully let myself feel until I was standing alone on foreign pavement with nobody waiting for me on the other side of customs.
I had flown business class alone exactly never in my adult life.
Every trip Robert and I had ever taken together, he handled the logistics while I handled the packing and the itinerary and the thank-you notes afterward, confirming hotel reservations and researching restaurants and building loose schedules he would then adjust to fit whatever call had come in that morning, and now I sat in a wide leather seat somewhere over the Atlantic with a glass of champagne I hadn't asked for and didn't finish, thinking about how strange it was to have access to every comfort money could purchase and to feel, underneath all of it, entirely unmoored, a woman surrounded by luxury and utterly without a map.
The taxi driver spoke enough English to get me to the hotel, weaving through traffic with a confidence that made me grip the door handle more than once, past ruins lit gold in the fading light, past fountains I recognized only from photographs, a small place near the Campo de' Fiori that Mallory had chosen because it didn't take corporate accounts and wouldn't show up on any expense report Robert might think to check, and I checked in under Bennett with hands that shook slightly on the pen, though the woman at the desk didn't seem to notice or didn't care, sliding the key across the counter with a warmth that had nothing to do with who I was or wasn't married to, and either way I was grateful for it.
Once I'd settled into the room, small and simple with shutters that opened onto a narrow street below, I stood at the window for a long time watching an old man across the way water a row of potted geraniums on his balcony, moving down the line with the unhurried patience of someone who had done exactly this at exactly this hour for decades, and something about the ordinariness of it steadied me more than anything else had since I'd landed.
Nobody in that whole city knew my name. Nobody expected me anywhere.
The realization sat strange in my chest, equal parts terrifying and, underneath the terror, something that felt almost like freedom.
I forced myself out again within the hour, unwilling to spend my first evening staring at a hotel ceiling, and I walked without a map for the first ten minutes before admitting I had no real sense of where I was, the streets narrowing and bending in ways that had nothing to do with the grid logic of San Francisco, and I stood at a corner for a moment feeling the particular helplessness of being lost in a language I didn't speak, before I made myself ask a woman locking up a shopfront for directions back toward the Campo de' Fiori.
She answered in rapid Italian, gesturing with her whole arm, and I understood perhaps a third of it, and found my way back anyway, piecing together her gestures with the shape of the streets, and something in successfully navigating even that small failure on my own, without Robert's assistant pre-loading a route into a phone, without Robert himself deciding which streets we'd take, left me almost giddy by the time I reached the hotel steps.
I passed a small bookshop on the way, its window lit warm against the darkening street, and I stopped to look at the display, novels I couldn't read a word of, and the owner, an elderly man arranging a stack near the door, waved me in without a word of English between us, simply gesturing at shelf after shelf with obvious pride.
I bought a slim paperback I couldn't understand at all, a novel with a faded green cover, more for the ritual of buying it than for any hope of reading it, and I carried it back to the hotel like a small trophy, evidence that I had wandered somewhere and returned with something to show for it, however useless the object itself actually was.
My phone had been off since the airport in San Francisco, and I turned it back on that evening sitting on the edge of the hotel bed, bracing myself before the screen even finished loading, watching the little wheel spin while notifications gathered themselves somewhere in the ether, preparing to land all at once.
Forty-three missed calls. Eleven voicemails.
A string of texts that started frantic and grew, over the hours, into something quieter and more careful, as though Robert had run out of the energy required for panic and settled into something closer to dread, the messages arriving in slower and slower intervals as the hours wore on, each one a little more subdued than the last.
I read the first message. *Where are you.
* I read the second. *Please call me.* I scrolled through the rest without opening the voicemails, unwilling yet to hear his actual voice, certain it would undo whatever fragile resolve had gotten me onto that plane in the first place, and somewhere around midnight his time, which meant late afternoon in Rome, a longer message came through, the first one that sounded like he had actually thought before typing it, the frantic shorthand of the earlier texts replaced by something more deliberate.
*I know what you heard, or I think I do. It wasn't what it sounded like. Please let me explain before you decide anything.*
I read it twice, sitting very still on the edge of the bed with the window open to the sounds of the street below, motor scooters and distant conversation and somewhere, faintly, music from a restaurant patio, and I set the phone face down on the nightstand without responding, because I understood, the way you understand a thing in your body before your mind catches up, that an explanation of one sentence wasn't going to explain twelve years, and I wasn't ready to let him convince me otherwise before I'd even had a chance to see what my life looked like without him managing it.
I lay back on the bed for a while, staring at the ceiling fan turning slowly overhead, and I thought about the conversation I hadn't let myself have with Robert in the bedroom two nights earlier, the question I'd asked and the answer he hadn't been able to give.
Do you want me. I turned the question over in the quiet, wondering whether I had actually wanted an answer, or whether some part of me had already known what silence would tell me and had asked anyway, the way you sometimes press on a bruise just to confirm it's still there.
I ate dinner alone that first night, at a trattoria two streets from the hotel with outdoor tables crowded close together beneath strings of small white lights, and a waiter who recommended the cacio e pepe with the confidence of a man who had never once doubted his own opinion, sweeping his hand toward the menu as though the rest of it barely warranted my attention.
I sat with a book I wasn't reading, its spine barely cracked, conscious of every couple at every nearby table, certain that everyone around me could see exactly how alone I was and exactly how strange that aloneness looked on a woman my age in a city built for romance, sitting at a table meant for two with only my own reflection in the darkened window beside me.
The waiter came back twice to check on me, refilling my water without being asked, and the second time he paused and asked, in careful English, whether I was traveling for work or for something else.
I told him something else, and he nodded like that answer explained everything, and moved on to the next table without pressing further, and something in the simplicity of the exchange, no judgment, no curiosity beyond the ordinary courtesy of a good waiter, let me exhale in a way I hadn't managed since the airport.
Nobody looked at me twice. The couple beside me argued cheerfully about whether to order dessert, their voices rising and falling in a rhythm that suggested this particular disagreement was a beloved ritual rather than a real conflict, and slowly, over the course of the meal, I understood that nobody in that trattoria was tracking my solitude the way I was tracking it myself.
I was the only person keeping score, the only one cataloging every empty chair across from me as evidence of something broken.
I finished the pasta, the sauce sharp and peppery in a way that made me close my eyes for a moment, and ordered the dessert I wanted without checking whether it fit into an evening I hadn't planned around anyone else's preferences, a small tiramisu that arrived dusted so heavily with cocoa it left a fine cloud in the air when the waiter set it down, and I walked back to the hotel afterward through streets still warm from the day, past a fountain lit gold where a small crowd had gathered to toss coins over their shoulders, past a church whose doors stood open to the night air, candlelight flickering somewhere in its depths, and I felt, for the first time since I'd stood outside that conference room, something that wasn't quite peace but was closer to it than anything I'd felt in longer than I wanted to count.
I stopped at the fountain for a few minutes, watching a young couple argue over whether the coin had to be thrown with the right hand or the left, both of them laughing too hard to actually settle it, and I found a coin of my own in my pocket, and I threw it in without a wish attached, just to see what it felt like to do something purely because I wanted to, with no one there to witness it, and no one to explain it to afterward.
Back at the hotel, I sat for a while on the small balcony outside my room with the paperback I couldn't read balanced unopened on my knee, and I thought about Robert, not the conference room version, not even the version from the messages, but an older memory, our second date, when he'd walked me home the long way around simply because he wasn't ready for the evening to end, and had talked, unguarded in a way I'd rarely seen since, about a fear that the company would fail before it ever really started, and I had told him it wouldn't, with a confidence I hadn't fully earned yet, and he had looked at me like I'd handed him something valuable.
I wondered, sitting on that balcony a dozen years later, when exactly he had stopped needing that kind of reassurance from me, or if he simply stopped asking for it because somewhere along the way he'd convinced himself he no longer needed anyone's confidence but his own.