Chapter 30: The Last Quiet Days
Italy made it dangerously easy to believe in softer versions of people. That was the first thing I learned there. Not that Anton became someone else entirely. He didn’t. He was still Anton, still too observant, too controlled, too capable of making concern sound like an instruction. But in his grandmother’s house, with the hills rolling out below us and the air smelling like rosemary and stone warmed by late sun, some of the harder edges in him stopped cutting quite so deep. Or maybe I stopped bracing for them every second. I woke later in Italy than I ever did in New York. Not because I had suddenly become peaceful, but because my body had begun to demand sleep with a level of authority I could no longer argue with. And every morning when I opened my eyes, there was a moment ,one bri
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