The thing about aeroplanes, Olivia had always thought, was that they were the last honest places left.
There was no pretending on a plane. You were suspended between one life and another, between the person you had been in the city you had left and the person you would perform in the city you were heading towards, and in the two or three hours of in-between there was nothing to do and nowhere to go and no one who knew you well enough to require anything of you. She had done some of her best thinking on planes. She had also done some of her worst.
She had a window seat, which she always booked and always regretted, because window seats gave you something to look at and looking at things, when you were trying not to think, was a liability. The man beside her had fallen asleep before they reached cruising altitude. The woman on the aisle was watching something on a tablet with headphones in. Olivia had her notebook open on the tray table and a pen in her hand and had written exactly four words in the last forty minutes.
The four words were: I should not go.
She looked at them for a moment, then crossed them out.
She wrote: I am going.
She looked at that too, then closed the notebook entirely and turned to the window.
Below, the Alps were visible through a break in the cloud cover — white and tremendous and entirely indifferent to the various human complications being silently managed in the aircraft passing over them. Olivia had written about the Alps once, in her second book, a chapter about a winter she had spent in a village in the Engadine valley where the snow came in November and did not leave until April and everyone moved through the months in between with a particular kind of patient, inward quiet that she had found both enviable and faintly suffocating.
She had left in March, two weeks before the snow cleared.
Isabella had called it a pattern. Isabella called most things a pattern when they involved Olivia leaving somewhere before she was entirely ready to, which meant that Isabella spent a considerable portion of their friendship identifying patterns. Olivia had, over the years, developed a number of well-reasoned responses to this, most of which amounted to: it is not a pattern, it is a professional necessity, travel writers travel, that is the nature of the work. Isabella, who had lived in the same flat in Madrid for six years and had strong feelings about the importance of having a favourite chair, remained unconvinced.
Olivia had called her the evening after booking the flight.
"Tuscany," Isabella had said, in the tone she reserved for things she found simultaneously alarming and inevitable. "For three months."
"It is a work assignment."
"It is where Ethan Castellano lives."
"He owns a vineyard there, yes. It is the vineyard I have been assigned to write about."
A pause. The particular kind of pause that Isabella deployed when she was choosing between several responses of varying levels of diplomacy and selecting the least diplomatic one. "Olivia."
"Isabella."
"Does he know you are coming?"
"He has been informed through the publisher, yes."
"That is not what I asked."
Olivia had looked out of her kitchen window at the London evening and said nothing for a moment.
"I do not know what he knows," she said at last. "I know the arrangement has been confirmed. I know he did not withdraw the offer when he found out. Beyond that, I cannot speak to his — "
"He did not withdraw the offer," Isabella repeated, slowly, as though she were turning something over in her hands to examine it from multiple angles. "Interesting."
"It is a professional courtesy. Nothing more."
"Of course," Isabella said, with the warmth of someone who believed absolutely none of what she was agreeing to. "Olivia, I want to say one thing and then I will leave it alone."
"You have never left anything alone in your life."
"One thing," Isabella said firmly. "You left that man in a doorway five years ago and you have been writing books about cold places ever since. Iceland, Olivia. You wrote an entire book about Iceland."
"Iceland is a fascinating — "
"You wrote about a glacier. For forty pages."
"It was a historically significant — "
"Olivia." Isabella's voice was gentle now, stripped of the teasing, which was somehow worse because it meant she was being serious. "Go to Tuscany. Write the warm book. And while you are there, perhaps consider that some doors, when you left them, did not close entirely behind you."
Olivia had said goodnight and hung up and sat for a long time in her quiet flat with its white walls and its bare shelves and its one good lamp, thinking about doors.
She ordered a coffee from the flight attendant and drank it looking at the clouds, which had closed again over the Alps, leaving nothing below but white.
She was trying, with moderate success, not to do what she always did when she was frightened — which was to write around the edges of the thing rather than looking at it directly. She was a gifted writer of edges. She could describe the perimeter of an emotion with extraordinary precision, its texture and temperature and the exact quality of light it cast on everything around it, without ever quite naming the emotion itself. Her editors loved this quality in her work and occasionally, gently, noted that the centre of things was also available to her whenever she was ready.
She was thirty years old.
She had last seen Ethan Castellano on the morning of the fourteenth of November, five years ago. It had been raining — the specific heavy rain of late Tuscan autumn that came in off the hills and settled into the valley for days at a time, patient and thorough. She had packed her bag in the guest room of the farmhouse while he slept, which was an act of cowardice she had dressed up at the time as consideration. She had carried her bag down the wooden stairs that creaked on the third and seventh step. She had stopped in the doorway of the kitchen, where the light was already on because Ethan rose early and had been up for an hour before she came down, and she had found him standing at the stove.
He had turned when he heard her on the stairs. He had looked at her bag. He had looked at her face. And then he had looked at her with an expression that she had carried with her for five years and had never found the right words for — not grief exactly, not anger, not even surprise, but something that contained all of those things and something else besides, something that looked, devastatingly, like a man recognising the exact moment he had been afraid of and finding it even harder than he had imagined.
He had not asked her to stay.
This was the part she had not expected. She had braced herself for an argument, had prepared in the night for raised voices and recriminations and the kind of scene that, when it was over, would leave enough debris that leaving through it would feel justified. Instead he had simply looked at her, and then looked away, and then said, quietly, with his back to her: I hope you find what you are looking for, Olivia.
She had said his name.
He had not answered.
She had walked out of the kitchen and through the front door and down the gravel path to where the taxi she had called was waiting in the rain, and she had not looked back, because she had known, with the certainty of someone who understood their own weaknesses very precisely, that looking back would undo her entirely.
She had not found what she was looking for.
She had found Iceland, and Switzerland, and a winter in Patagonia that had produced her most technically accomplished work and her most personally empty, and she had found a flat in London with white walls and a shelf of books she had stopped feeling were hers, and she had found three published memoirs and a growing reputation and the comfortable loneliness of a life built entirely around motion.
She had not found whatever it was he had thought she was looking for.
She was not entirely certain she knew what it was herself.
The seatbelt sign came on as they began the descent into Florence. The man beside her stirred and woke and looked out the window with the blank, adjusting expression of someone reassembling themselves after sleep. Below, through breaks in the cloud, the Tuscan landscape was becoming visible — the geometry of the fields, the dark lines of cypress trees, the ochre and terracotta of distant rooftops catching the afternoon light.
Olivia had been here before.
Obviously she had been here before.
She had been here for six weeks, five years ago, on the trip that had started as research for a magazine feature on Tuscan winemaking and had become, without her entirely planning it, something considerably more significant. She had arrived in late September knowing no one. She had met Ethan Castellano at a wine tasting in Montalcino on her third day, at a long table under a pergola, where she had asked him a question about the altitude of his vineyard and he had answered it so thoroughly and with such evident and unself-conscious love for the subject that she had found herself still talking to him two hours later when everyone else had moved on.
He had shown her the vineyard the following morning.
She had stayed for six weeks.
She had left on the fourteenth of November in the rain.
The plane broke through the last layer of cloud and Florence appeared beneath them — the burnt orange of the Duomo, the silver thread of the Arno, the city arranged in the flat of the valley with the hills rising behind it, green and amber in the October light. It was, as it had always been, enormously beautiful. Olivia looked at it with the professional detachment she had cultivated over years of arriving in beautiful places and felt, with a small shock of recognition, that it was not working. The beauty of it was getting through. She was looking at Florence through the window of a descending plane and feeling it, which was not what she had planned.
She picked up her pen. She opened her notebook to a fresh page, past the crossed-out words from forty minutes ago.
She wrote: Florence from above looks like something that has decided to stay.
She stopped. She looked at the sentence. It was not about Florence.
She closed the notebook.
The wheels touched down.
The drive from Florence to Montalcino took a little under two hours, through a landscape that became progressively quieter and more insistently beautiful the further south they went — the hills rolling in long, generous curves, the vineyards in their autumn colours running down the slopes in neat, patient rows, the light softening as the afternoon lengthened into early evening. Olivia sat in the back of the hired car and watched it all go past with her notebook closed on her knee.
She had told herself, on the plane, that she would use the drive to prepare. To think clearly and practically about the situation, to establish in her own mind the professional terms of her being here and the boundaries that would make those terms workable. She was here to write a book. Ethan Castellano was her subject's owner and her host. They were two adults with a shared history and sufficient maturity to work alongside each other for three months without that history becoming the primary thing between them.
This was entirely reasonable.
She almost believed it.
The driver turned off the main road onto a smaller one, then off that onto a lane that ran between two long rows of cypress trees, very straight and very tall, their shadows falling across the road in long parallel lines as the setting sun came at them from the west. Olivia recognised the lane.
She had walked it, five years ago, on clear mornings when the air was cool and the light was new and the day had not yet required anything of her.
At the end of it, the lane opened into a gravel courtyard, and beyond the courtyard was the farmhouse — stone, old, the colour of something that had been there long enough to become part of the landscape rather than simply an addition to it. Warm light in the downstairs windows. A fig tree against the south wall, its leaves beginning to turn. The old iron gate to the left, standing open.
The car stopped.
Olivia did not move for a moment.
She looked at the gate — the family name above it, worn almost smooth by decades of weather, just as she had remembered it. The sight of it did something to her chest that she did not have words for, which was, for a writer, a particularly unsettling experience.
Then the front door opened, and a figure appeared in the rectangle of warm light it made, and Olivia looked up, and Ethan Castellano looked back at her across the courtyard, and the five years between them collapsed so suddenly and completely that for a moment she forgot they had existed at all.
Then they came back.
She picked up her bag. She opened the car door. She stepped out onto the gravel, which crunched under her feet with exactly the sound she remembered, and she stood up straight and looked at him properly for the first time in five years.
He looked older. Not in a diminished way — in the way of a man who had grown into himself, who had been shaped by time rather than worn by it. He was standing in his doorway with his hands in his pockets and his expression entirely composed, and he was looking at her the way he had always looked at her: steadily, without performance, as though he had all the time in the world and intended to use it carefully.
"Olivia," he said.
One word. Her name. He said it with the tone of a man closing a very long calculation and arriving, without surprise, at the answer he had expected.
"Ethan," she said.
The courtyard was quiet between them. Somewhere in the vineyard behind the house, something moved through the leaves — wind, or a bird, or simply the evening settling into itself.
"You should come in," he said. "Lilian has made dinner."
He turned and went back inside.
Olivia stood in the courtyard for one more moment, her bag at her feet, the gravel pale in the fading light, the old gate open to her left.
Then she picked up her bag and followed him in.