Chapter Nine
Jill
Florence unfolded itself in ochre and terracotta, narrower than Rome, quieter in a way that suited the mood I'd carried onto the train, the countryside outside the window shifting from suburb to farmland to hills terraced with olive groves, farmhouses scattered across the slopes with laundry strung between windows, and Jane Sullivan met me at the door of the small boutique hotel with the easy warmth of a fellow American a long way from home, showing me to a room that overlooked a courtyard garden before I'd even finished introducing myself, her keys jangling on a ring at her hip as she led the way up a narrow staircase.
"You'll want the market on the east side," Jane said, when I mentioned the camera slung over my shoulder, pausing at the top of the stairs to point vaguely in the direction I should head.
"The leather workers set up early, and there's a woman who sells paper goods who has been photographed by every tourist with a camera in this city and still smiles like it's the first time.
Ask for Rosetta. Tell her I sent you, she'll let you get closer than she lets most people. "
Jane herself, I learned over the following days, had moved to Florence eleven years earlier after her own marriage ended, a story she told me in fragments over the hotel's small breakfast table, never quite the whole thing at once, only enough at a time that I understood she was choosing what to share rather than simply unable to stop talking about it.
She had been a corporate lawyer in Chicago before she left, she told me one morning, buttering toast with the brisk efficiency of someone who had done this exact task ten thousand times, and she had traded partnership track for a boutique hotel with six rooms and a courtyard she tended herself, and she had never once regretted it, not on the hardest days, not when the pipes froze the first winter and she'd had to learn Italian plumbing vocabulary from a book with a dictionary open beside her.
"My husband thought I'd lose interest within a year," Jane told me on my second morning, setting down a small dish of fresh figs she hadn't been asked for.
"He used to say it like a fact, not a worry, the way you'd mention the weather.
I think some part of him needed me to fail at this so he wouldn't have to examine why I'd wanted to leave in the first place.
" She smiled, a little wry. "Eleven years later, the hotel's still standing and so am I.
He remarried within two years, someone who I understand doesn't ask him uncomfortable questions about ambition.
I hope it makes him happy. I've stopped needing it to make me anything. "
I asked her if it ever got lonely, running a place like this by herself, and she considered the question seriously before answering.
"Some nights," she said. "But loneliness chosen on my own terms feels entirely different from loneliness handed to me inside a marriage that had already stopped seeing me.
I'll take this kind, if those are the only two options. "
I spent two full days doing exactly what Jane suggested, walking the market at dawn before the crowds arrived, the stalls just beginning to open, vendors calling greetings to each other across the narrow lanes, photographing hands at work rather than finished goods, the leather worker's calloused fingers threading a needle through hide with a precision that came from decades of repetition, and Rosetta, the paper seller, exactly as warm as Jane had promised, letting me photograph her folding sheets from six inches away, her hands moving faster than my eye could fully track, pausing every so often to hold up a finished piece for my approval before setting it aside with the others, and slowly the stiffness that had marked my early photographs in Rome began to loosen into something closer to what I remembered from before, the camera starting to feel less a tool for proving competence and more an extension of my own curiosity.
On my second morning at the market, Rosetta waved me over to her small workbench and, without much explanation, handed me a folded sheet of marbled paper and a thin wooden tool, gesturing for me to try the technique myself, dipping the paper into a shallow tray of swirled color and lifting it out in one smooth motion.
My first attempt smeared badly, the colors bleeding into mud, and Rosetta laughed, not unkindly, and demonstrated again, slower, her weathered hands guiding mine through the motion until my second attempt came out passable, streaked blue and gold in a pattern I found I was genuinely proud of.
She insisted I keep it, tucking it into my bag before I could argue, and I carried that small imperfect piece of paper with me for the rest of the trip, a physical reminder of a morning spent failing at something new and being allowed to fail without consequence.
Jane found me on the second evening, sitting in the courtyard with a glass of wine and my camera's memory card open on a laptop I'd borrowed from the front desk, scrolling slowly through the day's images, and she sat down across from me with the carefulness of someone about to deliver information she wasn't certain she should deliver, folding her hands on the table between us.
"There's a man been calling hotels across the city," she said, her voice low even though the courtyard was empty. "American. Describes his wife, dark hair, traveling alone, a camera. He called here twice today."
I felt my stomach drop even as some other part of me, quieter, noted that Robert was operating off nothing but the old itinerary and a description, no tracking, no invasive reach into confidential systems, just a man calling hotel after hotel and hoping, a method so old-fashioned and so entirely without leverage that it moved me, even in that moment of alarm, more than I expected.
"Did you tell him anything?"
"I told him we don't discuss our guests," Jane said, reaching across to refill my wine without asking.
"Which is true, and which I'd have told him regardless of whether you'd asked me to.
But I thought you should know he's looking.
Can I ask you something, and you can tell me it's none of my business? "
"Go ahead."
"Is he dangerous? I don't mean physically. I mean, is this a man I need to be worried about handing you a note from, if it comes to that."
I thought about the question longer than I expected to need. "No," I said finally. "He's not dangerous. He's just finally paying attention, about a decade too late, and I don't know yet what to do with that."
Jane nodded slowly, as though the answer confirmed something she'd already suspected from watching me those two days. "That's the harder kind, honestly," she said. "The dangerous ones are easier to walk away from. It's the ones who finally show up that make you doubt yourself."
I thanked her, and she waved it off, and something in the exchange, a stranger protecting my privacy without being asked twice, settled something in me that I hadn't known needed settling, a quiet confirmation that I was not, in fact, as alone or as exposed as I sometimes felt on this trip, that the world outside my marriage was populated with people willing to stand between me and whoever came looking.
We sat in that courtyard a while longer, the wine slowly disappearing between us, and Jane told me more about her own leaving, the actual week of it, packing a single suitcase while her husband was traveling for work, leaving a note far shorter than the one I'd eventually leave for Robert, and flying to Florence on a one-way ticket with no plan beyond the flight itself.
"I didn't have your itinerary," she said, smiling faintly.
"I didn't have any plan at all, which terrified me at the time and looks, in hindsight, like the smartest thing I ever did.
A plan would have given my husband something to trace.
I didn't even know where I was going until I was already on the plane. "
"Did he ever come looking?"
"Once," Jane said. "About eight months in.
Showed up at a hotel I'd stayed at briefly, months earlier, information he'd gotten from a credit card statement neither of us had thought to close.
By the time he arrived I'd already moved twice.
I think some part of me knew he'd try exactly that, and some part of me had already decided I didn't want to be found that way, traced through paperwork rather than invited. "
"What would you have done if he had found you?"
Jane considered the question seriously. "I honestly don't know," she said. "I've wondered that myself, over the years. I think it would have depended entirely on what he said when he got there. Whether it was an apology or a demand dressed up as one."
I left Florence the next morning before the market opened, catching an early train south along the coast, the city still half asleep as my taxi wound through empty streets toward the station, and before I checked out I left a note with Jane, sealed in an envelope with Robert's name written on the front in handwriting I recognized as steadier than it had been the day I left San Francisco.
*You missed me by four hours. I spent twelve years waiting for you to arrive. I'm not doing it anymore.*
I handed it to Jane with instructions to give it to him only if he showed up in person, not to mail it, not to call ahead, and Jane tucked it into the drawer behind the front desk without asking any questions I hadn't already answered by leaving it at all, giving me a small nod that felt, somehow, close to a blessing.
"For what it's worth," Jane said, walking me to the door, "eleven years out from my own version of this, I can tell you the leaving is the easy part. It's the deciding what to do with the space afterward that takes the real work. Give yourself time with that part."
On the train, watching the hills roll past the window, cypress trees dark against a sky going gold at the edges, I thought about the version of myself who had booked a flight under her maiden name four days earlier, frightened and furious and barely able to hold a pen steady enough to sign a hotel register.
That woman felt distant already, replaced by someone who had spent two days photographing strangers' hands and hadn't once checked her phone to see whether Robert had noticed she was gone.
He had noticed. I understood that from Jane's story, from the calls to hotel after hotel with nothing to go on but a decade-old itinerary and a description that fit half the women traveling alone in Italy that season.
But noticing wasn't the same as understanding, and I wasn't ready to let one apology, however specific, undo twelve years of learning to expect less than I deserved, the train carrying me south toward a coast I had never seen, toward a version of my own life I was only just beginning to imagine.