Emily stood on the sideline of the seventh-grade soccer game watching a daughter who didn’t belong to her. Though she had to be working hard, the girl was the picture of American pre-pubescent effortlessness: white tube socks to the knee, dark ponytail low and bobbing, cheeks merely rosy. Emily wished that she hadn’t spent her youth frowning at the stray hairs between her eyebrows. Then again, Emily had never looked like that.

Next to her, a woman was screaming, loudly, for another girl. “Get her, Julia!” the woman kept shouting. “Get her!” At a time out, the woman turned to Emily to ask which was hers. She pointed to Hayley, the brutish broad-shouldered goalie.

“She’s good,” Wanda said, and introduced Emily to Marcia, who was Wanda’s neighbor.

Marcia identified her daughter as the forward at whom Emily had been staring. Emily wanted to ask Marcia what it was like to have a beautiful daughter, but instead said, “that was a great assist earlier.”

“She’ll brush it off in the car. Modest to a fault.”

Hayley had just transferred to the private school. Emily was shy, and among the parents at the old school, she’d been lonely.

The women began small talk, which after only a few minutes turned into talk of Wanda asking Marcia what she was working on.

“She’s an artist,” Wanda explained.

“Really?” Emily had never met a professional artist. “What kind of art?” She wondered if she made any money doing it.

“Mixed media.”

“She’s kind of famous.”

“Untrue.”

“The modesty is genetic. You should see her stuff.”

Emily had wanted to pursue piano, but her parents wouldn’t let her. She’d gotten a job in marketing instead. John made enough that she didn’t have to go back after having Hayley, and it wasn’t like she wanted to return to her carpet-tiled office with the labyrinthine hallways. Three right turns just to get to the women’s bathroom. It hadn’t seemed like a sacrifice at the time.

A mom down the sideline in a pink peacoat waved to Marcia and Wanda. They waved back, then Wanda grimaced. “I haven’t signed up for the team mom slot.”

“Me neither,” said Marcia.

“Is that the person who emailed us?” asked Emily.

“Catherine,” said Marcia. “She’s nice.”

“Uh huh,” said Wanda.

The email had contained an overabundance of exclamation marks, which annoyed Emily.

She didn’t want to be in charge of Gatorade and orange slices for a game just because another mom on the team was imploring her to “support our girls!!!” Emily found the unwritten expectations of good mothers—bringing goody bags to the class on your child’s birthday, chaperoning field trips—to be so tedious that she was repelled by any woman who showed overt enthusiasm for them.

“I know I should do more as a mom,” Emily said.

“‘Should’ is a dirty word,” said Marcia.

Emily googled the women that night. She found a short review of one of Marcia’s shows in a Chelsea gallery fifteen years earlier, calling her monochromatic cut-paper collages “heady but intuitive.” Wanda used to work, according to her LinkedIn, as an immigration lawyer.

At the following week’s away game, Emily found Marcia and Wanda in the bleachers.

They beckoned her over.

“We brought you something,” Wanda said, and handed Emily a travel mug. “It’s wine.”

“Really?”

“You don’t drink?”

“Of course I do.”

“Cheers.” The women clinked their thermoses with hers. “These games are fucking boring.”

By the second half Emily was loose-lipped with gossip and giddy with new friendship. “Sometimes I read Julia’s journal,” Wanda said. “Just to see if she says anything about me.”

“Does she?”

“Once she called me a fat cow. But she’s called me that to my face, so,” Wanda shrugged. “Not groundbreaking information.”

“Hayley doesn’t talk to me,” Emily said.

“At all?”

“She doesn’t tell me how she is. Doesn’t tell me about her day. John gets all the info out of her, somehow. It’s like she’s allergic to me.”

“That’s tough,” Marcia said.

“Lizzy tells you things?”

“From time to time.”

“Hi ladies!” They looked up to see Catherine, the emailer, standing a row above them on the bleachers. “Some game, huh?”

They hadn’t looked at the scoreboard in a while. Emily felt alarmed that they had missed something important. But it was still tied, 0-0.

“We haven’t met,” Catherine said, reaching her hand out to shake Emily’s hand. “I’m Annabelle’s mom.”

Emily introduced herself.

“Hayley’s amazing.”

“She’s something.”

“So rough and tumble. That save earlier!”

Emily wanted to say, they’re in seventh grade. She hadn’t seen the save.

“Can I join you all?”

“Of course!” Marcia said, with a plain enthusiasm that bothered Emily. She thought these women had chosen her. But perhaps they were equal opportunists, and Emily was nothing special.

“Want some wine?” Wanda offered her thermos to Catherine.

Catherine looked at the thermos quickly, then seeming to temper her reaction into a non-judgmental one, responded brightly, “no, thank you.”

The women were quiet.

“We’re new,” Catherine said. “We came from Lincoln. Nebraska? My husband got a job here.” That felt presumptuous to Emily, to be a new mom coming in and taking the reins on the email list.

“Emily’s new, too,” said Marcia.

“I don’t mean to be a pill,” said Catherine. “But I haven’t heard from you three? About the team mom schedule?”

Wanda put her palm to her forehead. “I completely forgot.”

“It’s not too late!”

“Sign me up,” Wanda said. “Whenever.”

“No, thanks,” Marcia said.

The women looked at Marcia and waited for her to say more. But she didn’t.

Was that it? Marcia simply could say no to the request, without explanation? Emily hadn’t known that was possible.

Catherine was looking at Emily now. How nice it would be to be like Marcia. But Marcia was an artist on top of being a mom. This was Emily’s whole job.

“Sure,” Emily said. “I’ll do it next week.”

She could barely remember what it felt like, the satisfaction of groping for meaning with her fingers. There was always something else to do: a carpool, a load of laundry, a yoga class, a grocery run. The days filled themselves with necessity and betterment, and something like playing the piano achieved neither of those things, got oneself nowhere.

“Why did you all leave the district?” Marcia asked Emily after Catherine said goodbye.

“Because you could?” Wanda asked.

These women were so familiar already. Emily liked it.

John made enough now. To go to a private school, with lower teacher-student ratios, with more AP classes, with a real soccer team, was something Emily would have wanted as an adolescent girl. Instead, the Black girls in gym class had accused her—an early bloomer—of stuffing her bra, and she spent all of seventh grade pretending not to cry in her bedroom, lest her mother, a first generation Russian Jew raised in Brooklyn who’d become upwardly mobile herself by marrying a WASP and moving to a raised ranch in the suburbs, told her to “toughen up.”

“Because we could,” Emily answered.

In the car, Emily asked Hayley, as nicely as she could, “have you made friends with any of the girls on your team?”

Hayley was looking out the window. “They’re too rich,” she said.

“You’re not poor.”

Hayley picked her nose, then wiped it on the window.

“That’s disgusting,” said Emily.

Hayley turned to glare at her mother. Always, now, this look. Emily wouldn’t let it bother her.

“I met a few moms,” Emily said.

“I know. You were talking to them instead of watching me play.”

“I was watching you!”

“Stop lying,” Hayley said.

Emily would have never talked to her mother like that. But, unlike her mother, she wouldn’t rail on her daughter for it. This was how you broke the cycle—by doing things differently.

Emily composed herself. “Do you like their daughters?”

Hayley snorted. “No.”

“You should be trying to make new friends at a new school.”

“Julia and Annabelle are too normal.”

“What’s wrong with normal?”

“They like Taylor Swift.”

“What about Lizzy?”

Hayley shrugged. She picked her other nostril, then examined the findings.

When they got home, Emily made dinner, and John came home, and they ate at the table and John drank a bottle from the cellar—it was important to eat as a family, without screens—and then Hayley went upstairs to do her homework and John went to his office to review his bottle and Emily did the dishes and wiped down the counters and got on the couch under her weighted blanket and watched Nurse Jackie.

By ninth grade, things couldn’t have been better. The women were best friends. And the girls were best friends! Hayley and Lizzy were paired as lab partners in honors chem and, miraculously, Emily began to hear them laughing upstairs during study sessions. Soon the four of them were having sleepovers at Lizzy’s house while their mothers soaked in Marcia’s hot tub and talked about what their husbands liked in bed. Emily said John liked foot stuff. She only knew that to be true from the texts she found on his phone; they hadn’t had sex in three years.

Wanda said she recently peed on her husband. “On the sheets?” Catherine asked.

Wanda laughed. “In the shower.”

“I used to like public stuff,” Emily said then. The women turned to her.

“When I was in college. Studying in Italy. I had this boyfriend, Wesley. He was from West Virginia. He said ‘buon giornio’ like ‘bwon journo.’” She thought of when she first heard him talk, at student orientation, with that ridiculous accent. He’d been dressed nicer than anyone else in the room, in polished loafers and khaki pants, as if his mother had advised him. She wanted him to never stop trying to do things right.

“Where?” Wanda asked.

“In a courtyard. In the lobby of his apartment building.”

Catherine giggled. Emily had warmed to her. She had a sweet, Midwestern presence that calmed Emily and made her feel like she’d never be the tamest one.

“I remember being in a packed bar. The way his hand crept up my thigh. And kept creeping. And he just talked to me, the whole time. I had to pretend we were just having a conversation.” She took a sip of her drink. “I came so fast.”

The women laughed, shrieked. Their bodies were shriveled and red from the hot tub but they didn’t get out. With her new friends, Emily felt like she was finally being rewarded for how good she’d been all these years, how dutiful a mother and wife, how she moved through her identical days without complaint. It was a relief, to make the women laugh, to remember a self—brave, bold, brazen—that she hadn’t known for decades.

◆

The women were on their third round of Aperol spritzes.

“This exchange rate is ridiculous,” Wanda said, stuffing her face with salami. “One to one. I need to get William something at Gucci.”

“Is William a Gucci guy?” asked Catherine.

“Oh yeah.”

“You have to get him something cute!” said Catherine. She was practically screaming. “I love my Gucci belt.”

Emily watched a slim Italian woman in a silk kimono and leather slingbacks walk across the square. She was smoking a cigarette. She carried herself with a practiced carelessness so organic Emily nearly bought it. The woman knew, of course, that the drinkers at the other tables were watching her, envying her. No woman who dressed like that expected to be ignored.

Emily and her friends were in Florence commemorating their newly empty nests. The girls had just left for college.

Marcia wasn’t drinking an Aperol spritz, actually. She was drinking a dry white wine.

“Does anyone want cigarettes?” Emily asked.

“Ew,” Catherine said.

“Don’t be such a prude. We’re in Europe.”

“Thomas would kill me.”

“You’re on vacation,” Emily said. “He doesn’t have to know.”

“It’s the one thing that will just completely sabotage your health,” Wanda said.

“Says you.”

“What does that mean?”

She meant, Wanda’s weight. But instead, she said, “I’m going to buy a pack.”

She walked into the bar. They sold cigarettes at bars in Italy. Their waitress, at the register, had a dark pixie cut and cheekbones that cut into her face. Emily missed the obliviousness of being young. When you aren’t aware of the ways your looks will depreciate, you don’t have exchanges with older women and wonder if they used to be pretty. You don’t think about them at all.

Emily bought Camel Blues, her brand when she lived here, and a lighter. She wondered where Hayley would study abroad. She wanted to encourage her to come to Florence, like she had, but Hayley didn’t want to do anything her mother had done. She probably wanted to study somewhere weird, like China.

Emily returned to their table with the pack. She sat, triumphantly, and pulled one out. She showed the pack around the table.

“No takers?”

Wanda and Catherine shook their heads.

She thought Marcia, at least, would be a co-conspirator. She’d lived a whole past bohemian life in Williamsburg in the early 2000s. She’d not just casually smoked like Emily had that one semester in Italy; she’d been a smoker.

“Marcia?”

But Marcia just shook her head. “I can’t,” she said.

“You’re not going to get re-addicted.”

“It’s the principle.”

“Come on.”

But Marcia refused again.

Emily pouted. “You’re no fun.”

Emily lit the cigarette and inhaled, feeling that old pleasant/unpleasant head rush. She blew smoke away from the table. Everyone fell quiet. They were sipping, carefully not watching Emily smoke while she watched them not watching her. After a few moments, Catherine waved the air in front of her face.

Emily held her cigarette aloft. “Really?”

Catherine shrugged.

“I’ll excuse myself,” Emily said. She stood and walked to the middle of the square. She sat at the base of a fountain that wasn’t running. Across the way was a church she’d been inside a long time ago. It was funny to come back to a place you’d been when you were younger and appreciate the beautiful things. That semester she was always drunk or heartbroken. She didn’t do things like look at the facade of an old church and wonder how the marble stayed so white.

She’d thought, mistakenly, they could complete the job of shedding their suburban skins here. Heartbreak felt like something, at least. Like the cigarette, making her sick.

◆

She had considered it, reaching out to Wesley, but only in her hotel bed, with Catherine asleep across the room, did she actually do it. She’d been watching him move across the globe with his family for a decade. His wife would tag him in the photos. “Mexico City, here we come!” “The Walker clan is back in DC!” The wife worked for the foreign service—an impressive job for someone with such embarrassing Facebook captions—and Emily knew that, now, they were in Rome.

Did he think of her, she wondered, when he returned to Italy? Did he see old men playing bocce ball in the park and make up their backstories with his children, like he and Emily had on their strolls through Florence? Did he return to Montisi, with his wife this time, building a fire in a cold villa and drinking so much Chianti they fell asleep on the floor?

She’d had plenty of Chianti herself at dinner, though the longing and melancholy that came from returning to the place where you’d been young and in love persisted even in sobriety. There was only a scrim let down, a shyness removed. The desire to scratch the itch had been there, and now there was bravery, too.

She kept it short. She knew to do that much. She told him that she was in Florence and that she had seen that he was living in Rome. She told him what her life had been like the previous twenty-seven years. She told him about Hayley and John and their home. She told him about the friends she traveled with. There was nothing else to say. Her whole life, after him, was complacency and the unfulfilled promise of the supposed joys of motherhood. Her whole life, just lines in an email. He knew her to be ambitious, didn’t he? Didn’t she play for him, once, on an out-of-tune upright Steinway in their school’s music classroom? He’d shaken his head and said, “what a mind.”

John had promised a way of life. She used to think that was the same thing as a life itself.

And so she added, at the bottom of the email, “I hope you know that I still think of that time with little butterflies in my stomach. When I’m old and dying I’ll probably remember and smile and think, wow, that was fun.”

“This was just about the best email I’ve ever received,” came his response the following morning. He told her how life had been—the travel, the writing. He had published a series of sci-fi novels under pseudonyms, though he was always working on his real books.

Then there was the picture. He stood at the seashore, two smiling teenaged children in windbreakers, flanking him, but she wasn’t looking at the children. She knew what he looked like already, from the pictures on Facebook—that his hair was grayer now, that there were lines around his eyes, that he had become fitter and wore tighter t-shirts since the Florence days. But there was something that felt different about the photo being meant for her. His open-mouthed smile was boyish and mischievous. His wife was absent from the photo and he looked at the camera like a dare. It was hard not to imagine that he was looking at her—Emily—thinking about what he would do to her if they were alone again. She knew it was absurd to look at a single picture of someone you hadn’t seen in twenty-seven years and know that you still loved them. But what else to call it?

“We’ll actually be in Montisi this weekend,” he wrote. “We wanted to do a Tuscany weekend. I said, ‘I know this cute town.’ Are you going to the country? If our stars align, maybe we can sneak away for a drink.”

“How odd,” she’d responsed. “We are going to Tuscany this weekend.” And though Montisi wasn’t, technically, on their itinerary, it wasn’t far off the path.

◆

On the ceilings of the Uffizi were paintings of baby angels. On the floors were marble statues of violence.

“Get a load of this guy,” Wanda said to Emily, of Hercules beheading a centaur.

Catherine was taking so many pictures she was bumping into people. Marcia was walking far ahead of them, going into the little gallery rooms and not inviting anyone to join her. Emily trailed behind, watching her look at the art. Marcia wore big square glasses with thick rims and a linen shift dress. She still showed her legs, even though she had spider veins. She seemed to not care or not notice. Emily wasn’t sure which would have been more enviable.

Emily’s bag vibrated against her thigh. She had responded to Wesley that morning to cement their plans, and she waited for his response. But when she picked up her phone, she saw a call coming from an Italian number. She walked to a window overlooking the courtyard and answered.

“Ciao, Miss Ellis? We have a problem with the auto.”

Emily had arranged for a driver to take the women to the country and drive them around for three days. On family trips to Europe, their husbands did the driving. They wanted to drink, and they were on vacation. It had been an easily agreed upon expense—one of those decisions it was a pleasure to have the money to be able to make. Emily was planning on asking the driver to take her to Montisi late one night, away from the women. But now there was, perhaps, a problem.

“What kind of problem?”

“The driver? He has the Covid.”

Of course. “Don’t you have another driver?”

“There is—” she heard the man say something to someone else in Italian and a woman in the background responded. “Outbreak,” he repeated. “All of our drivers have this.”

“All of your drivers have Covid,” said Emily.

“You will have a full refund right away miss.”

“Our reservation is for tomorrow.”

“The Covid. It cannot be helped!” he said. “But do not worry. I have a friend. His name is Giuseppe but you will call him Beppe.”

The man’s poor English had made it seem like more of a problem than it was. “That’s fine then. But will we get a discount, given the last-minute change?”

“He has a car for you.”

“And he’ll drive.”

“A car, miss.”

“A car? Without a driver?”

“You don’t have license?”

“No, we do—I do—but we paid for a driver.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “It cannot be helped.”

“You don’t know any drivers that don’t have Covid?”

“No, miss.” There was a hardness developing in his voice, as if this were Emily’s fault.

“You’re not understanding,” she said. “We can’t drive here.”

“Don’t worry. It is automatic car. Not manual.”

“But…your drivers are crazy. And the roads. They’re scary. Especially in the country.” She wasn’t that worried about that. But she wondered if he would understand this better. They had paid for a driver.

“Oh!” The man laughed. “You are afraid.”

“No,” said Emily.

“It’s okay. You will take the number. Beppe is a good teacher.”

“Can Beppe drive us?”

The man laughed again. “Beppe runs a business. He cannot drive you for many days.”

“I’ve never had to work so hard to get someone to take my money,” Emily said, tired of being laughed at.

“This is the only solution,” the man said.

It was a snag. They would get there regardless; everyone had been looking forward to the wine tasting. A quick excursion would not be impossible. Emily’s quickening heart and the promise of fulfillment had been keeping her keyed up all morning. She would do whatever she could to glide along on that feeling all the way to Montisi.

◆

That night, they went to a restaurant in Florence with one Michelin star and a gold painting on the ceiling.

“Cheeky,” Marcia said, looking up at it.

“Cheeky?” Emily asked.

“It’s a play on all the frescos in the city. It’s postmodern. There are little smiley faces, cartoon fishes, see? It’s not attempting to be realistic the way, say, Michelangelo was.”

“Are you talking about the Sistine Chapel?” Catherine said. “That’s in Rome.”

“It’s in Vatican City,” Marcia said. “And I was giving Emily an accessible example.”

A phone was ringing. Catherine picked up.

“Annabelle?” Next to her, through the phone, Emily could hear the faint whimpering of a college freshman from across the ocean. “Oh, sweetheart.” Catherine stood and left the dining room.

“Boy problems,” Wanda said.

“Hayley would never call me about something like that.”

“It’s Hayes,” said Marcia. “Right?”

“What?

“Lizzy told me.”

“It’s all very new,” said Emily. Being a teenager meant trying on identities until you found the one that fit.

The waitress came to take their order. It was a prix-fixe menu.

“Should we order for Catherine?” said Marcia, who went ahead and did it. Marcia also ordered their first bottle of wine, and tasted it in front of the waitress, who wore a suit and held her hands behind her back.

Catherine returned after the glasses were poured.

“Is she okay?” asked Marcia.

“She’s heartbroken.”

“Boy problems,” said Wanda. “Didn’t I say that?”

“It’s a girl. She said, ‘I love who I love.’”

“You’re a good mom,” Wanda said, grabbing Catherine on the arm. “Always there for her baby. That’s all you can do, right?”

No one cared that it was a girl. Emily didn’t care that it was a girl, either—but didn’t it warrant a comment, at least? It was a different path from the one they’d taken, was all.

“Now I’m going to be thinking about her all night,” Catherine said.

“Drink your wine,” Emily said. She lifted her glass. “To forgetting!”

The rest of them clinked and drank. The wine was delicious. She didn’t know how Marcia always knew what to order. She wished she could say something smart about it. Instead, she said, “yummy.”

Small plates of deconstructed tuna tartar appeared in front of them. Talk turned to the food. They drank. They laughed. One course ended; another began. Poached eggs with truffle confit. Bowls filled only a third of the way with delicately textured ovals of pasta. Emily took a bite of gnocchi. She felt the ridges of it against the tip of her tongue. She tasted the butter, the salt, the pesto. She let the little potato pillows dissolve in her mouth. She tried to hold onto the tastes, but she knew, soon, that she would forget them, that her bowl of gnocchi would be gone and she would go home and only be able to reminisce about its memory. When she experienced something pleasurable, she tried to exist only in that moment—to live in it. Though there was always a voice in her head, when she had an orgasm, for instance—alone, only ever alone—that said, “this is the thing you’ve been wanting,” and acknowledgement of the consummation of her desire often stripped it of its power. It then became just another thing she wanted and got that would, like all things, end.

Marcia was talking to her. “What time in the driver picking us up tomorrow?”

Emily swallowed her food.

“We’ll get the car around nine,” she said. She gestured to the waitress, who appeared quickly. She lifted her wine glass. “Anyone else?” At least one of them nodded. “We’ll do another one of those.” Emily pointed to the bottle Marcia had picked out.

“Grazie, Giselle,” said Catherine.

The waitress walked away. “How do you know her name?” asked Emily.

“She told us.”

“Get the car?” said Marcia.

Emily started laughing. “The driver got Covid.”

“Whoops,” said Wanda.

“So there’s a new driver?” asked Catherine.

“They didn’t have another one. I’ll drive,” Emily said, with a spirit of altruism in her voice.

“I thought we hired a driver because we wanted to drink,” said Catherine.

“And because the drivers are crazy,” Marcia said. “You shouldn’t drive.”

“We can take turns,” Wanda offered.

“Let me call them,” said Marcia.

“There’s no point,” Emily said. “It’s done.”

“Then I’ll drive,” said Marcia.

“Why can’t you both do it?” asked Wanda.

“I know the roads here,” Marcia said, though Emily doubted that was true. On every one of her vacations with her family to Europe, how many times did Marcia drive instead of her husband?

“I’ve driven in Italy, too,” said Emily.

“When you were nineteen years old?”

“Why do we have to go to the country?” Catherine asked. “There’s so much to do here. Like this lookout spot at the top of the city. And at least six more churches.”

Wanda said, “I could take or leave the wine tasting.”

“We have to go,” said Emily.

“But why?” said Catherine. “Maybe the car thing is a sign.”

“Because that’s what you do when you come to Florence. You stay in the city for three nights, and then you go to Tuscany.”

“What’s the town we’re going to again?” Catherine asked.

“Siena,” said Emily, rolling her eyes.

“What’s wrong with Siena?” asked Marcia.

“I thought we all chose it,” said Wanda.

“You chose it,” said Emily, looking at Marcia. “I’m not excited to stay in a castle with every American couple on their honeymoon.”

“Jesus,” said Marcia.

Wanda spoke, after a minute. “In terms of the car—”

Emily was growing frustrated by how little faith her friends held in her. “I can drive!” she insisted.

“You’re not listening to me,” said Wanda. “I don’t think—”

“I didn’t realize this was such a—”

“Let me finish my fucking sentence,” said Wanda.

The women were quiet.

“I don’t think it’ll be that bad,” Wanda finally said. “To drive.”

Marcia said, “But not Emily.”

Emily turned to Marcia. “What’s the issue?”

“You’re dangerous. You look at your phone. You tailgate. You’re all over the place.”

“I was the one who arranged all of this,” Emily said. Marcia insulting her driving only made her double down on her need to do it. It didn’t matter who drove the car that got them to Tuscany. As long as they got there. But Marcia, with her smugness, her need to always know more than everyone, about everything—Emily didn’t want her winning this one. Postmodern. Did she know how to use that word in a sentence because she went to graduate school? Emily could have gone to graduate school. She doubted Marcia had even used it correctly.

The thought dawned on Emily that she could get the car without them; they didn’t have to stay together. Then Marcia let out a defeated sigh. “I hope there’s insurance,” Marcia said. Their next course arrived: octopus tarts with sea urchin foam. Emily silently rejoiced.

◆

The driving was fine. Florence was not that different from anywhere else. They passed a bunch of gas stations. They went around a bunch of roundabouts. It was sort of like Boston.

Emily hadn’t heard from Wesley in two days. She kept looking for pockets of cellular but she only had one bar or none at all. If he had sent an email, she wouldn’t know. Marcia sat in the passenger seat. She said to Emily, “could you stop looking at your phone?”

For lunch, Marcia navigated them toward a tiny town she’d been to with her husband years earlier. Sitting next to them, a long table of men looked over blueprints and drank bottles of red wine.

When the waiter came, Catherine asked, with that Midwestern lilt to her voice all these years later, “do you have a salad?”

The man said no. It was only misto plates. “More cheese and ham it is,” Catherine said.

“It’s traditional here,” Emily said. “For lunch. Little snacks.”

“I know. I just want a salad.”

“We all want salads. That’s not why we came to Italy.”

“Why did we come to Italy?” asked Marcia.

“It’s vacation,” said Emily.

Marcia looked up the cobblestone road behind them. “There’s a church up that hill, if I recall.”

The waiter walked past. “Mi scusi.” Emily said. “Do you have Wi-Fi?”

She got the password, signed online, and refreshed her email. Nothing. She put her phone on the table. They waited for their food.

“I’m going to go see the church,” Marcia said.

“I’m sick of churches,” said Emily.

“I’ll come with you,” Catherine said.

They went up the hill. Wanda looked at her phone. She was texting someone, smiling. She didn’t tell Emily who.

They got back into the car to drive to Siena. It was another forty minutes away.

“Did we go out of our way?” Emily started the car. “I thought Siena was only an hour from Florence.”

“Just a little,” Marcia said. “I wanted to see the church.”

Emily refrained from rolling her eyes. After all, she had won: she was going to see Wesley the following night. She thought, as she pulled onto the main road, of how long she’d gone without a man’s pheromones. As she drove past rows of olive trees spaced evenly from one another, she wondered how long she’d last before sniffing his neck.

The car climbed toward a hilltop village. It gave her a small thrill to be reminded of Montisi and its self-contained charm. The limestone and the terra cotta. The green shutters and the bell tower. The women were unusually quiet. Through the rearview mirror, Emily watched them reverently watching the countryside pass them by. She was satisfied: they saw the romance, the antiquity. They saw what she saw.

They descended the hill and approached a vineyard. She remembered a wine tasting she had done on a field trip during her semester here, how she walked through the rows of vines and noticed the unruly stalks were zip-tied to the posts. She was remembering, now, how disorienting it had been to see something as sterile as a zip tie attached to something as romantic as a Chianti vine, when she felt her phone, in the center console, vibrate.

With one hand on the steering wheel, she used the other to unlock the screen. Marcia was saying something to her, but she was reading.

“Not going to work out this weekend,” the email said. “13-y-o has strep. Staying in Rome. Life!”

She heard her name.

The road, having been so smooth beneath her, now continued in one direction while the car went in the other, careening down a grassy slope. For a moment, just a moment, Emily enjoyed her body lifting from the seat without worrying about the corresponding drop. She’d never minded that feeling of her stomach dropping on a roller coaster. It was always the exhilaration in the moment beforehand that made the ride worth it.

The car, and Emily, touched down. Marcia took the steering wheel from Emily, and the others screamed while the car sped toward the vineyard’s wooden fence.

“The brakes!” a voice screamed. “Emily!”

As if she’d always been planning to, Emily hit the brakes. The women lurched forward, then back. The ground stopped.

The wooden posts marking the outside of the vineyard were close enough that Emily could make out the rust on the barbed wire threaded between them. She noticed that she was breathing heavily, though maybe this was a physiological response. It had all just happened.

Marcia spoke. “Is everyone okay?”

Emily tried to turn toward the backseat, but a sharp twinge in her neck forced her forward.

“What the fuck, Emily.” Wanda.

“I think I cracked a rib,” said Catherine.

Emily looked in the rearview mirror. Catherine was holding onto her side.

“How?”

Marcia got out and opened the backdoor on Catherine’s side of the car.

Wanda was still in the backseat with her seatbelt on. She and Emily looked at each other through the rearview mirror. “How long were you planning to go before hitting the brakes?” She looked vindicated, somehow.

Emily opened the car door and stood, relieved to see that her legs were just fine. She looked up. Another sharp pain at the back of her neck; she put a hand on the spot and held it there. The road was above them. Their car was below. They would need to be towed. At least they hadn’t hit the fence.

Her friends were standing around Catherine. Emily approached to see if she was okay, but Wanda put a hand around Catherine, as if protecting her from Emily.

“I’m sorry,” Emily said. “I got distracted.”

“I knew we shouldn’t have let you drive,” said Marcia.

“Let me?”

“She needs to go to the hospital,” said Marcia.

“We didn’t hit anything,” Emily said.

“You were a madwoman,” said Wanda. “She got thrown against the door.”

Marcia pulled out her phone. “I’ll call an Uber.”

Wanda clucked. “All because you wanted to fuck some guy from thirty years ago.”

“What?” said Emily. Wanda’s language was always so crass.

“The guy!” Wanda said. “When you studied abroad here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We planned this whole trip so you could feel young again.”

“What do you mean?”

“Catherine saw the email on your phone,” said Marcia.

Emily looked at her injured friend. “You were looking at my phone?”

“It was on the nightstand,” Catherine said, clutching her rib. “It lit up. I saw his name.”

Emily said, “You’ve all been talking about me?”

“You can go see him if you want,” said Marcia.

“I didn’t—we didn’t plan the trip for that,” Emily said. “It was a spur of the moment thing.”

“Nothing’s ever enough for you,” Wanda said. “Your husband. Your kid. Us. You’re perennially dissatisfied. It’s the root of all your problems.”

“Wanda,” warned Catherine.

“Julia calls you,” Emily said, feeling satisfied to have evidence to throw at Wanda. “Hayley doesn’t call me. She’s at school in Brooklyn. An hour away. It’s been a month. Haven’t seen her. Only get text responses. She’s too busy. She doesn’t see anything wrong with it.”

“Yeah, maybe because you misgender them,” Wanda said. “Their name is Hayes.” Wanda looked at her friends. “You know what Emily said when Hayes came out to her?”

Emily knew what whatever came out of Wanda’s mouth be taken out of context.

Wanda spoke. “Emily said, ‘You don’t always have to be the center of attention.’”

Emily felt herself begin to cry. Wanda was so good at making Emily sound cruel and unfeeling, because—Emily realized, with a jolt to her heart—that Wanda believed she was cruel and unfeeling. Once, they had bonded over the loneliness of motherhood—over being exiled by the girls they’d borne. All these years, she’d thought they were on the same team. When had her friends become her enemies? When had everyone stopped taking her side?

When Emily learned she was having a daughter, she wrote, in a journal she planned to give the child one day, of all the ways she would be a better mother than her own. When her daughter was upset, Emily would not tell her that there were people in the world who suffered more. When her daughter misbehaved, Emily would not punish her, but ask why. They would share a bond based in intimacy and trust: the daughter would tell her mother everything, and the mother her daughter.

But from the moment Hayley entered the world, she was leaving Emily’s. When she was a toddler, Emily would say, “do you have a kiss for mama?” And Hayley would shake her head. Smirk, toddle away. It broke Emily’s heart every time. This was that. The refusal of love. The refusal of connection to the mother, the womb, the body.

So when Hayley—Hayes?—came out to them, Emily had been hurt. Wasn’t she allowed to be hurt?

“I defended you to Julia.” Wanda shook her head. “No more.”

Through tears, Emily said, “I don’t know why being a mother means you can’t have your own feelings.”

Marcia spoke. “Did it ever dawn on you that you didn’t give them what they needed?”

“But I never got what I needed.”

Marcia said, “it isn’t your turn anymore.”

“You give up your whole life for them,” said Emily. “They could come for dinner once a month.”

“Your whole life?” said Marcia. “What’s your whole life, Emily? What do you do in your whole life? You sit in my hot tub. You talk shit about your family. You think about what you could have been. Your kid just went away to college! You can do whatever you want! But you’d rather blame the rest of the world for the ways you don’t live your own life. I’m starting to think you never even played piano.”

“I did,” Emily said. “I was good.”

“I see your face when you come into my studio. It’s not jealousy. What’s the word to describe it? Disdain, maybe. I know you like my art. But you pretend that it’s just fine. That you could do it. If you had the chance.”

A car pulled up on the side of the highway.

Wanda crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not getting in the car with her.”

“Catherine needs to go to the hospital,” Marcia said.

“We’ll get another one.”

They walked up the ravine, all four of them, with Marcia and Wanda flanking Catherine and Emily apart from them. Only Emily and Catherine got in the car. Wanda and Marcia waited for another that would take them to the hospital. Someone would call a tow truck, and tell them where to take the car, and Emily would pay what she needed to pay to make the problem go away, and then they would go back to Florence. Maybe Emily would fly home alone. It would be better to leave them first and not the other way around. She’d had enough of heartbreak.

Emily and Catherine sat in the backseat. They passed more vineyards, more olive groves.

Now the vistas were clichéd. There was no point to being in Tuscany without a lover.

At a sharp turn in the road, Catherine let out a sharp breath.

“Are you okay?” Emily asked.

“I’m fine,” Catherine said. She kept holding onto the side of her rib, as if that would make her feel better.

“You don’t have anything, either,” Emily said to Catherine.

“What do you mean?”

“Besides Annabelle. You don’t have a job. A passion.”

“I go to museums by myself.”

Emily never knew that.

“I never knew that,” she said.

“I studied art history in college,” said Catherine. “This whole trip, looking at the art—I remember things. It feels good to use my brain.”

“I was never good in school,” Emily said. “I didn’t mind the work but, I just wanted to have fun. My daughter, she’s the opposite. I don’t think she’s ever had fun in her life.”

“You’re not—you can’t do that, Emily. You can’t just deny their existence.”

It wasn’t denial of existence. It was the opposite. Hayley existed because Emily existed.

Why didn’t anyone understand how intertwined this all was? It was personal.

“And I don’t find it to be a burden,” Catherine said quietly.

“What?”

“Being a mother.”

That first night in Florence, Emily had let the outside of her thigh touch Wesley’s on the roof where they looked up at the stars. Never had she been so aware of a seemingly innocuous body part. They had sex five times that night. The third or fourth time, straddled on top of him, he looked at her disbelievingly, holding her eyes in a shy way, then taking a piece of her hair and pushing it behind her ear. Tears sprang to her eyes. Oh, she thought, with a clarity that made her feel both elated and doomed. There were only a couple months of their love story, though in memory it felt stretched across an entire lifetime, the life of a person who was only distantly related to her.

On Thanksgiving, they borrowed his Italian friend Massimo’s car and drove to Montisi, the tiny town where his dead grandmother’s villa was, uninhabited throughout the winter. There was no heat, Massimo warned them, but they could stay there alone, away from their roommates. Emily liked being around people, and she was surprised to find herself agreeing to a romantic weekend alone during a time that should have made her homesick. They baked the only potatoes they could find—small and golden, not russet, not quite right—and ate cold slices of prosciutto and mozzarella from the grocery store. They drank Chianti and built a fire and he sang to her and made her laugh so hard it hurt to try to regain her breath. In the morning, he was distant and quiet, blaming a hangover. She knew that, soon, he would leave her.

When they got back to Florence, he sat her down on her twin bed. “I’m not supposed to get this deep,” he said. There was a girl from Huntington, he admitted. They were taking a break—she was studying in Barcelona—to make sure this—being together, forever—was really what they wanted. They had only previously ever slept with each other.

“And being with me made you realize you want to be with her forever?”

“It’s not like that,” he said.

“I’m in love with you,” she said, and he winced as if she’d slapped him.

“She and I have a history. I need to protect that.”

She called him a coward and told him to leave her room. That winter she put on ten pounds and slept with men she hated. One had McDonald’s wrappers lodged between the mattress and bedframe of his top bunk. Another stopped sex in the middle of the act to tell her that he couldn’t finish because she reminded him too much of his younger sister.

Wesley had married the woman. And now, he stayed back with his family. The choice had been made, and made again.

“Emily?” Catherine said.

She was crying again, silently, but Catherine knew it. She was a kind person, Catherine.

Emily was not kind. Emily was bitter, and now she was old, too.

“Do you still want to go to Montisi?”

Emily shook her head.

“What’s there anyway?” Catherine asked.

“Nothing,” Emily said. “It’s just a town.”