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She snorted. “Black coffee and a piece of toast.”
“I thought maybe we could stop worrying about the diet stuff until it was time for me to start the medicine.”
“Well, we can’t,” she said. “You need to stick to your health plan so you can keep your body in as good condition as possible. That’s going to help you tolerate the meds when the time comes, but that’s not all it does. It’s also going to make sure your disease keeps on progressing as slowly as it has so far—that’s important. You want your ten years, don’t you?”
“I want a lot more than that.”
“Follow the plan, then. No skipping meals.” She pointed to the pasta. “Eat.”
He actually did, to her surprise. She’d thought he would keep arguing, or maybe just ignore her, but it seemed that he had decided her advice was worth taking after all.
And there was advice he had asked her for—advice she hadn’t really managed to give him successfully.
Amy took a deep breath. “Did you want to talk about your surrogacy options?” she asked. “I know we never really finished that conversation. If you wanted to revisit it, I’d be open to that.”
“We don’t have to,” he said.
“Have you made a choice?”
“Well, no, not yet.”
“Maybe I can help, then.”
“I sort of got the impression that you didn’t want to help with that.”
She closed her eyes. “I was afraid I’d made you feel that way,” she said.
“How else could I feel about it? You practically ran away when we had that conversation.”
“And you really don’t know why that was?”
He was quiet for a moment.
Too long. She heard the unspoken things in his silence. He knew exactly why she’d run when they had talked about surrogacy options, and he knew it had nothing to do with not having a desire to help.
He got to his feet suddenly. “Can I take you somewhere?”
* * *
It was a rare thing to see Adriano drive his own car. Amy felt a sense of the surreal as they sped along the winding road that followed the shore of Lake Como. He was fast behind the wheel, faster than Luca. He seemed as if he really enjoyed driving.
“Why do you have a driver?” she asked him.
He glanced at her. She could tell he understood what she was really asking. “It’s hard sometimes,” he said. “I have a lot on my mind. A lot of work to do, a lot of phone calls to manage. I don’t always have time for things like driving myself.”
Amy shook her head. “Sometimes it’s like you’re from another planet.”
He laughed. “What does that mean?”
“I have a lot of work too,” she said. “I’m a doctor. I often have to answer calls when I’m not at work, and my voicemail is always packed with messages from patients that I have to return. I have to do those thingswhileI drive, or find another time to do them. And I don’t enjoy driving half as much as you seem to—although, to be fair, maybe I would if the views in Denver were this nice.”
“The views in Denver are pretty great if you ask me,” Adriano said. “The mountains are unlike anything else in the world.”
“You have mountains here,” she pointed out.
“Not like the ones in Denver.” He sounded almost wistful. “Lake Como is beautiful, but the mountains in Denver blew me away.”
She was surprised to hear him say it. Every time she started to let herself believe there was nothing more to him than a shallow rich guy, he would say something that surprised her.
