Chapter 122. Fork in the Road

After the funeral, Dante is quiet in the car. The windshield wipers fill the silence between us as we sit in traffic, headed back into the city.

“Do you want to see Piacere?” he asks suddenly.

I pluck at the hem of my dress. My stomach is still empty, grumbling in a way I know means I’m losing the next thing I put into it too, and I’m exhausted. But the club I spent so much time in this summer, the place Dante and I really met, is gone, and I haven’t really internalized that yet. Today seems like a day of saying goodbye to things. The secret growing inside me. What Seb and I could have been to each other, if only we had the time. I may as well look at the remains of the life I thought I was going to have when I entered Piacere that first night.

“Yeah.”

He twists the wheel, and we pull out of the traffic headed into Manhattan for the slightly lighter traffic aimed at our island. The long silence of the drive is almost meditative. Snippets of the