Page 10 of Falling for Mr. October

Just a few weeks, my brother Nico told me. Go there for a few weeks, and everyone will forget what happened by the time you come home. It’ll blow over.

He’s wrong, of course. I turned on my cell phone before I went upstairs to look for Bianca, and there were dozens of voicemails and messages on it.

People are looking for me. They want to know where I’ve gone so they can follow me again. Ask me questions. Take my photo. Ask me what happens next in my story.

My heart races at the thought, so I shove it down and take a mouthful of food. It’s hot and good, the taste of my nonna’s sauce so familiar I feel my nervous system settling.

I remind myself that no one will be looking for my alter ego here. Apple Ridge is even sleepier than my hometown, and so full of elderly people, Bianca and the other medical professionals in town are guaranteed job security.

Which makes it an ideal hiding place.

True, our family is connected to the Murphys, but very few people know that. It’s been so many years. There’s so much water under that particular bridge.

While I’ve kept up with Miles, Miles has barely kept up with his family. The person he’s closest to is Bianca, mostly because she won’t let him fall off the face of the earth. Which means he’s told me a few things about her over the years. So I already know she had a broken engagement and that she works at a retirement home after leaving two better-paying nursing jobs. I’m also aware that the farm isn’t doing well.

“So, Giovanni…” Nonna Rose says.

I set my fork down and smile at her. “Yes?”

“Your grandmother told me your ex-girlfriend just got married.”

I can feel Bianca staring at me with her big brown eyes. Her lips are probably parted, her wet hair tucked primly behind her ears. She’s growing out bangs but they keep tumbling into her face like they want to tickle her. It’s strange that I’ve already memorized her adult appearance, but maybe it’s only because she’s the first girl I ever kissed.

She doesn’t know that. It’s not the kind of thing you tell a girl. But it’s true.

Bianca never liked me, and it’s not like I had a thing for her, but my heart did try to escape from my chest when she dipped her head toward me.

You remember your first kiss. Everyone does.

I still recall the way she tasted, like strawberry gum, and how soft her bottom lip felt. Enough that I’d wanted to test it with my teeth…

“Giovanni?” Nonna Rose prompts.

Right. She asked me about Janine.

“Yeah,” I say flatly. “I’m happy for her.”

Because you can’t tell a woman you’re expected to call “nonna” that your ex-girlfriend sucks.

Up until last year, I’d been enough of a dumbass to think Janine and I were it. We’d dated all through high school, and after she moved back home, we picked up where we’d left off. I figured we’d settle down, have a couple of kids, and I’d keep running the family business with Nico. It would be a good, solid life.

Sure, I used to imagine bigger and better things. I’d dreamed of being an explorer. Acting in movies. Opening a big restaurant. But after my grandfather died, I came to accept there’d be no big adventures for me. I told myself they’d been pipe dreams, anyway, and I could always live vicariously through Miles’s adventures.

When Janine and I had been back together for about a month, I got a little drunk and told her about my settling-down plan, and she laughed. She told me we were just having a little fun, and fun was all I could deliver. Why, I could barely even keep a mom-and-pop shop running.

So when I found out Hidden Italy was in financial trouble because my grandmother had messed up the books, I decided I’d come up with a plan to save the day.

It was supposed to stay secret, but secrets have a way of getting out. Just about everyone at home now knows what I was up to, from my grandmother to my little sister to my second-grade teacher.

Which is why I’m hiding in a North Carolina farmhouse, like a damn coward.

I heave a sigh and rub my temples, suddenly feeling every single hour I spent behind the wheel of that Range Rover, a present Enzo bought for our grandmother. Of course, we all know it was actually for me, since Nonna refuses to wear glasses and would be a menace to every man, woman, child, and squirrel in the continental United States.

Enzo isn’t happy with me right now either, a thought that makes me feel worse.

He’s my big brother, but he’s more than that. Our mother left us when we were kids—drove off one day and never came back—and my father’s solution was to isolate himself. So Enzo and my grandparents took on the job of raising the rest of us.

“Why you no eat?” my grandmother presses, reaching for my elbow as if she’s going to physically force the food into my mouth.