“Me too,” he said. “I would very much like to be friends.”
“Great.” She nodded.
“You know what I think is great about friendships?”
“Tell me.”
“They are built in the best of times and the worst of times,” he said, more for his sake than hers.
“In the age of wisdom and the age of foolishness?”
“Maybe?”
“Are we quoting literary greats aside from Dickens? I love this game. ‘Life offers us tickets to places which we have not knowingly asked for.’ Who is that?” She paused. “No, wait, I won’t make you guess. It’s Maya Angelou.”
“Interesting choice of words,” he said. “No, what I mean is—” He paused, looked up, and let himself take in every bit of her face. And he made a decision. No matter what happened from here on out, there was no way he was ever going to lie to this woman. “I mean that Franca made some phone calls, and it turns out that since you are here in Italy and you will be processing your documents here as opposed to having them sent back to the US—” He paused. She was stock-still, listening. “You will have to declare residency in Italy.”
“That’s OK,” she said with a shrug. She did not seem to understand the gravity of what he’d said—at all. “I have a lot of time and no place to go, so I can do whatever I need to do for the next couple of months.”
“No, I mean, to declare residency, you need to be living at an address that is considered permanent. That means it can’t be a vacation property or short-term rental. It certainly can’t be Beatrice’s bed-and-breakfast. It has to be a real residence with a real lease with your real name on it.”
“A lease? That’s ridiculous. Plenty of people are residents in places where their name is not on a lease.”
“Not here. Not if they are trying to gain citizenship.”
“Can’t I say I am staying with someone to use their address?”
“Only if they were a family member and you were their legal dependent.” He hated that he had the answers to all of these questions.
“How will they even know? Are they going to come by and personally check?
“Yes,” he sighed. He could tell that the answer caught her off guard. Most people expected loopholes where there were solid walls here. “There is a physical residency check that police perform once someone declares. And it’s not only foreigners, by the way. They do it to us too.”
“This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. You’re saying I have to rent a place to live.”
“Yes.” He nodded.
“Here.” She pointed down to the floor.
“Yes.”
“And really live in it,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Because someone is going to check.” She squinted.
“Yes,” he said, hanging his head.
“I’m speechless.”
“I’m sorry.”
Lora slid down into the chair, staring at the air between them.
“Are we still friends?” he asked, ducking down to catch her eye. She looked up at him, silent. “Because if you were one of my friends, I would ask you a very serious question about whether or not you really want to do this. You haven’t filedanything. You haven’t even found Ivo’s birth certificate yet. It’s not too late to back out.”
“What?” Her voice cracked like she hadn’t spoken in a week.
