Chapter 36
‘I’m fine,’ Gabriella said. ‘Just another near Gabriellaism avoided.’
‘A what?’
‘Never mind.’
Luca knew she wasn’t fine. He was getting the measure of her now.
She did a good job at her pretence but, every now and then, he saw it.
A change of expression that she thought no one caught.
Most people didn’t catch it, but he was used to playing that game too.
He was aware he did exactly the same thing.
‘I know. It just got a little intense for a minute.’ He passed her a bottle from the batch on the shelf. ‘I’m having one too.’
She took it, opened the lid and drank.
‘Cheyenne is intense too,’ Luca stated. ‘She reminds me of an even more highly charged version of my sister.’
‘She reminds me of everything I dislike about this industry,’ Gabriella answered.
‘So, why do it?’ Luca asked as he hung the garment bag up and unzipped it. There was silence until he turned around and faced her again. She seemed to be contemplating, her eyes on the child-drawn murals on the wall. Until she slumped down onto a seat.
‘I don’t know anymore. I didn’t think it would be like this.’ She sighed. ‘And what if the reason I was doing it wasn’t the right reason?’ She shook her head. ‘I mean, there is more than one reason, but I seem to have to, I don’t know, fight all the time.’
‘In what way?’ he asked. He pulled up a chair next to her and sat down.
‘In every way. And, first of all, at the beginning, people listened to what I had to say. But, gradually, bit by bit, they stopped listening as much. And now, here in New York, with the new cover and the amendments, it’s like the book could have been written by AI.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. Because the book… it’s all about feelings. Artificial intelligence has no knowledge of that. And the drawings and the poetry… a computer can’t replicate those things.’
She looked at him, the mask dropping. ‘You’ve really read it?’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, I’ve read it.’
‘And what did you think?’
‘You want me to tell you the truth?’
‘Yes, of course.’
He looked directly at her. ‘I thought it was sad.’ He took a breath. ‘I know that many people, millions of people, think it’s the most uplifting self-help book they’ve ever read but, to me, at the heart of it, I just felt there was kind of… despair.’
He watched her reaction to his words. On the outside she appeared unmoved but there was something beneath the surface, tempered, yet somehow he could sense it. Perhaps now he had said too much…
‘Well,’ she said, controlled. ‘Don’t tell Cheyenne. “Despair” is the very last thing she wants anyone to talk about in the same breath as Zero Fucks Given. It’s all rainbows and matcha as far as she’s concerned.’
‘And you’re OK with that?’
‘Sometimes you have to be OK with things you have no control over.’ She looked up at him. ‘It’s called survival. And, in reality, that’s all any of us are trying to do.’
‘Is that what you really think?’ he asked, leaning a little forward on his chair.
‘It’s not what I think,’ Gabriella said. ‘It’s what I know.’
‘But it shouldn’t be like that. Survival suggests living every day just trying to stay alive.’
And, as her eyes met his, suddenly he had never seen her more clearly and everything dropped into place.
‘That’s it,’ he whispered. ‘That’s what you do.’
‘I don’t have any other choice,’ she said in such a matter-of-fact way it tore at him.
It was a statement but, he also felt it was a plea.
Not a cry for help exactly but a peek inside her mind that was privileged.
He wanted to reach out and touch her hair, palm her face like he had on Manhattan Bridge, ask a million other questions…
A knock on the door broke the moment. ‘Twenty minutes, Gabriella.’
Before he could do or say anything else she was up on her feet, decorum restored. ‘I should get dressed.’
He stood too. ‘Yeah, I will do that.’