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He remembers too.

He gives me a small nod before lifting his glass and looking at Nora.

“La dolce vita,” he says.

A light breeze moves across the terrace. I look past them toward the waves and the sky turning pink above them, then lift my own glass.

Hope you see this too, D.

“To life.”

Our glasses meet.

We drink.

Then we fill our plates, and just like I knew they would, the damn flowers taste fucking exquisite.

CHAPTER 20

Eleonora

One week in Calabria, and it did my heart good.

But now, as I stand on the ferry taking us from Calabria to Sicily and stare at the island before me, the one Damiano used to talk about so much, his homeland… all these memories come back.

And grief stands right next to me like an old best friend, looking out at the same view and understanding perfectly how much this hurts and makes me smile at the same time.

It didn’t start out like this, my relationship with grief.

In the beginning, I cursed her, threw her out of my home for months on end, but she always came back.

Silent, knowing and observing.

One thing you have to give her credit for? She never once judged me.

While the whole world saw me destroying myself and giving up, she was the only one down there with me, ten feet underwater while I was drowning. The only one who saw that I was actually trying to surface and breathe, but I just couldn’t.

So I learned to let her in slowly, one day at a time.

And that bitch has the WORST timing. Let me tell you.

You’re just driving? Going for groceries or waiting in line at the bank to see when those bastards will let you take money out of your joint account, and there she is… making you cry.

Bitch.

I smirk.

But somehow, this bitch called grief became important to me.

I learned in Lander, when all I had was her and my dead husband’s best friend as a neighbor, that if I let her live with me, if I let her show me memories that hurt and break me and I let myself cry… then the rest of the day, or sometimes the next few days, don’t hurt as much.

So we have this agreement, the bitch and I.

I kind of ignored her in Calabria… I needed time to be Me again.

But right now, as we approach Sicily?

The bitch just hooked her arm through mine and told me, “This one is going to hurt big time.”