Ildiko’ Szasz

The Scent of Salt

A Forbidden Love Story of Passion, Mystery, and the Sea

Published by Tektime

Translator: Tem Jin (TJ)

Copyright © 2026 – Ildiko’ Szasz

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the author/publisher, except for personal and private use as permitted by law.

The characters, places, and events described in this work are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

To those who have learned that some loves

do not come to save you,

but to keep you from falling back asleep.

Preface

In certain cities, the sea is not a landscape. It is a consciousness.

It breathes behind the houses, rises into courtyards with the wind, slips into rooms as light and scent, settles on railings, on glass, on skin, and above all in people’s thoughts. It grants no respite. It watches. It remembers. It returns.

In Port Sanvelio, no one truly lives far from the sea, even when they pretend otherwise. Its call arrives in the morning, along the streets that slope toward the harbor, in the laundry strung between balconies, in schoolrooms where children draw boats without knowing that adults spend their lives searching for a shore. It comes in the evening too, in the lit windows of the upper district, where families dine in silence, each guarding its own small, invisible ruin.

There are lives that appear complete, orderly, even fortunate, and yet conceal beneath the surface fine fractures. They do not show themselves at once. It takes time, a sliver of light, an unexpected glance. Then something gives way. Not with a crash, but with the quiet precision of what cannot be avoided.

Lorenzo Valenti and Elena Roversi were not looking for each other. This is perhaps the most dangerous part of their story. They were not two adolescents waiting for the moment that would finally set life in motion. Their lives, at least on the surface, had long since begun. They had taken shape. They had produced children, habits, homes, anniversaries, photographs, a domestic geography of duties and gestures repeated often enough to resemble fate.

He had learned the patience of tides and the language of hidden faults in boats. She had learned the value of silence, the weight of unspoken words, the almost cruel art of smiling without giving herself away. Both understood composure. Both had long since stopped expecting too much of themselves.

Then something small happens, as decisive catastrophes almost always do.

Two children sit at the same school desk.

A mother turns at the gate.

A father lifts his gaze for a moment longer than necessary.

And everything that had seemed stable until the day before begins to shift, first slowly, then with the quiet force of an undercurrent.

But no adult love ever arrives alone. It brings with it whatever it finds: guilt, hunger, longing, fear, buried truths, desires that never found a name. And sometimes it drags into the light what others have buried too quickly.

In a port city, where money changes hands in the dark, alliances are made and broken behind respectable facades, and the dead rarely fall silent, desire can become not only scandal, but an opening. A threat. A revelation.

This is not an innocent story.

It is a story of the sea and of lies. Of bodies that recognize each other before they truly meet. Of children, of houses lived in like stages, of promises worn thin by the need to appear faithful. Of a man and a woman who discover too late that being alive does not always mean truly living.

And when love arrives late, it asks no permission. It asks for courage—or ruin...

Chapter 1

The Green Gate

In Port Sanvelio, September had its own way of beginning.

It never truly followed the calendar. Instead, it arrived on a morning when the sun still looked like summer but hung lower, casting slanted, oblique shadows across the faded facades of the seafront. The air, though warm, carried a hint of hesitation. The café tables remained outdoors and the last of the tourists strolled with the aimless slowness of those without a schedule; yet the city, under that clear and almost deceptive light, was already beginning to turn inward.

Schools, offices, and routines returned; families fell back into their familiar geometries, appointments into their old constraints, and silence reclaimed the spaces it had vacated before the summer.

Lorenzo Valenti noticed it that morning. He drove slowly along Lighthouse Road, his left hand resting on the wheel while his right reached back every so often to steady the backpack on the rear seat.

“Dad, take it easy,” Emma said.

“I’m already going slow.”

“No, I mean easy when you park. Last time you hit the curb.”

Lorenzo gave a soft laugh, catching her eye in the rearview mirror.

Emma was nine, her dark hair pulled into a ponytail so tight it could only have been the work of a mother in a hurry. She watched him with that vigilant seriousness children wear when they believe themselves to be more competent than the adults around them.

“I didn’t hit the curb,” he countered. “I just gave it a close greeting.”

Emma rolled her eyes with the composure of a little woman accustomed to loving her father, flaws and all. In the seat beside her, thirteen-year-old Viola—who considered every family conversation a minor public humiliation—continued to stare at her phone with the air of someone who was only there by mistake.

“If you’re late on the first day, it’s not a tragedy,” Lorenzo said.

“Not for you,” Viola shot back. “Because you don’t have P.E. at eight-twenty.”

“I’m afraid I’ve never truly recovered from that injustice.”

Viola didn’t smile, but the corner of her mouth twitched just enough to reassure him.

He had always taken them to school on Mondays and Wednesdays. Or at least, he had since his business at the harbor began to grant him that relative freedom—a freedom he had mistaken for a privilege for years, but which now, after all this time, felt more like a form of truce.

He managed a nautical services company that he had taken over from his father almost without realizing it, the way it happens with certain family trades: you step in to lend a hand during a complicated summer, and fifteen years later you’re still there. You are still checking outboard motors, moorings, maintenance, supplies, and paperwork for vessels that pass through your hands like lives in transit, all of them headed somewhere else.

He loved the sea, or at least he had always believed he did. Over time, he had learned that loving an element and working within it are two different things. Work strips the poetry from everything. It delivers the smell of diesel alongside the salt air; the tally of breakdowns alongside the beauty of light hitting a hull. And yet, on certain mornings like this one, when the sun fell over the city with an almost cruel clarity, Lorenzo still felt something akin to gratitude.

He parked in front of the San Celso primary school, in a disorganized row of economy cars, oversized SUVs, and lopsided scooters. The gate was green and high, its paint peeled by the salt and the years. Behind it lay a narrow courtyard with scraggly trees and a cream-colored building that looked almost cheerful in summer, but in autumn took on the melancholy of public places—destined to contain the time of others without ever truly holding onto its meaning.

Emma climbed out of the car with a backpack larger than she was and turned around immediately. “Are you coming at pickup today, too?”

“If they don’t hijack me at the harbor, yes.”

“Promised?”

“Promised.”

She nodded, satisfied, then ran toward the gate with the breathless speed of someone who wants to seem independent but hasn’t yet learned how to be so without looking back. In fact, she did look back. Lorenzo raised a hand. She did the same.

Viola snorted. “You weren’t this sentimental with me.”

“I was. You were just too busy judging me.”

“I still am.”

“I’ve noticed.”

They said goodbye with a sort of awkward, half-embrace, as happens with teenagers who love you but refuse to provide public evidence of it. Then Viola also entered the upper school just a bit further up, leaving him alone in the brief void that follows gestures repeated for years.

It was then that he saw her.

Not suddenly, not with the spectacular effect that love stories attribute to destined encounters. First, he saw a child dragging an open backpack, dropping two pencils onto the sidewalk. Then, a woman’s hand reaching down to pick them up. Then the line of her wrist; the composed movement with which she put everything back inside without haste—as if, amidst that chaos of bells, greetings, shouts, and children, she had preserved the privilege of calm.

When she looked up, Lorenzo had the strange sensation of recognizing her. Not in the literal sense of the word. He was certain he had never met her before. And yet, something in her figure—perhaps the way she stood so straight, the severe luminosity of her gaze, or that unostentatious beauty that seemed to live more in restraint than in display—gave him the impression of a memory in advance. It was as if her face belonged to a portion of time he had not yet lived, but which, for obscure reasons, was already familiar to him.

Her dark brown hair was gathered in a soft, low twist, with a few strands loosened by the wind. She wore a simple ivory dress, cut with the kind of precision that needs to exhibit nothing to be self-evident. The boy beside her resembled her in the eyes; less so in the mouth, which was wider and more restless.

The boy said something, gesturing toward the courtyard. She leaned down to listen and, as she straightened back up, she met Lorenzo’s gaze.

It lasted only a moment. The exact amount of time it takes for two strangers to notice one another and choose whether to register the fact or let it dissolve. She did not look away immediately. Neither did he. In that shared gaze, there was an almost imperceptible suspension—an internal silence that had no right to exist, and yet, there it was.

Then, it was Emma who shattered it.

“Dad!” she shouted from the gate. “Tommaso is in my class!”

Lorenzo turned. Emma was pointing directly at the boy beside the woman. He smiled with the reflex of a parent forced into socializing by circumstance. “Really?”

The woman gave a small nod. “Tommaso Roversi.”

“Mine is Emma.”

“I know. He already told me about her yesterday. He says your daughter draws horses beautifully.”

“It’s true,” Lorenzo said. “Horses, cats, dragons, and lately, even dolphins with a level of self-esteem that is frankly excessive.”

The woman smiled. It was a brief smile, but enough to change her face. It didn't soften her; it made her more readable, as if behind that self possession there was an irony held in check for too long.

“Tommaso, on the other hand, draws sinking ships,” she said. “I hope it’s not a sign.”

“It depends,” Lorenzo replied. “If he does it well, he might become a shipowner.”

She laughed softly. The boy tugged at her sleeve. “Mom, let's go.”

There was something strangely gathered in that "Mom." Not the usual infantile urgency, but a habit of her presence as a private, necessary harbor.

“Well, have a good first day,” she said.

“You too.”

The woman nodded and headed toward the gate. As she passed him, the wind carried a hint of her scent: a clean, dry note, not sweet, something between neroli and wet wood. Lorenzo was not a man inclined to notice a woman’s perfume, or at least he didn't believe he was. Yet it stayed with him with the irritating precision of a useless detail that refuses to be forgotten.

He stood watching her as she handed the boy over to the school attendant, adjusting the collar of his polo shirt and whispering something in his ear that made him smile. Then she turned and headed back toward the exit, alone this time.

When she was level with Lorenzo, he took a half-step sideways, almost involuntarily, as if his body had decided before his mind that it wanted to prolong the moment.

“I’m Lorenzo Valenti,” he said.

She stopped. Not surprised, but attentive.

“Elena Roversi.”

The handshake was brief and firm. Adult hands, unhesitating. Yet Lorenzo felt a faint current travel up his arm regardless—a physiological trifle to which he immediately assigned less importance than it actually deserved.

“Are you new to the area?” he asked, regretting the mediocre question almost as soon as it left his mouth.

“Not exactly. I’ve lived here for twelve years.”

“Twelve years and we’ve never crossed paths?”

“Port Sanvelio is better at hiding people than it seems.”

She said it with a naturalness that made the statement, for that very reason, memorable. Lorenzo looked at her a second longer than necessary. She didn't seem annoyed; rather, she seemed to have realized he was trying to figure out if the remark was merely elegant or slightly truer than was permitted.

“Perhaps,” he finally said.

Elena tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Tommaso gets along well with Emma. For me, that’s already a great start.”

“For me, too.”

Another mother approached to greet her. Elena offered a polite smile, and in that gesture, Lorenzo understood something he couldn't yet name: this woman belonged to that rare class of people capable of being impeccable without granting any real access. Everything about her seemed measured, yet not cold—as if she had learned to protect an inner space not out of vanity or calculation, but through experience.

They said their goodbyes simply and went their separate ways.

Lorenzo returned to the car, but instead of leaving immediately, he sat with his hands resting on the wheel, watching a dry leaf being dragged across the windshield by the wind. He felt vaguely ridiculous. He was forty-three years old with a wife, two daughters, a business with suppliers to call, and three boats stuck in the shipyard with various problems. There was no reason in the world to give weight to a brief exchange in front of a school.

Yet, as he started the engine, he realized he was already rethinking not so much Elena Roversi’s beauty—which was there, clear and undeniable—but the phrase she had left him with, spoken almost without intent: Port Sanvelio is better at hiding people than it seems.

He worked poorly for the rest of the morning.

At the harbor, the sun beat down on the corrugated metal of the warehouses with an intensity that was almost white. Two workers were replacing a bilge pump, a German client was demanding an impossible-to-find spare part by that afternoon, and a wounded seagull walked crookedly along the quay like a humiliated old captain. Lorenzo moved from one issue to the next with the automatic competence of a man who knows his trade even when his mind is elsewhere.

He checked invoices, called a supplier in Ancona, and argued with the new kid over a wrong delivery. Then he found himself staring at the monitor without actually reading the lines of the open email.

“Boss,” said Sergio, the mechanic, leaning into the office. “Everything all right?”

“Of course.”

“You sure? You just signed an invoice with last month's date.”

Lorenzo looked down at the paper, saw the error, and smiled. “It must be the charm of the new school year.”

Sergio laughed. “Either that, or you aren’t sleeping enough.”

He slept enough. He had been awake for years.

This idea, hitting him without warning, irritated him. It contained a small but insistent truth. His life was not unhappy; it simply hadn't provided a spark in a long time. It didn't ask for much, and it didn't grant much. It had the correct shape of a successful life: a respectable marriage, two healthy daughters, a bright house on a quiet street, a stable financial position, and a circle of acquaintances wide enough to avoid loneliness but shallow enough to avoid demands. Even with Giulia, his wife, the relationship maintained a zone of civil efficiency that many would have called serenity.

Giulia taught literature at the middle school and possessed an organizing intelligence, a capacity to force chaos into form. She had made their common life habitable with the same precision she used to organize books by theme, towels by color, and vacations months in advance. Lorenzo loved her. He had loved her deeply. Perhaps he still did, in a different way—quieter, less dizzying. There had been no great explosions, no betrayals, no dramas. Only a progressive sedimentation. It was as if their love, left exposed to the air for too long, had dried out, transforming into a structural loyalty: reliable, but devoid of momentum.

He went home for lunch.

Giulia was in the kitchen in one of those blue blouses that made her look more severe than she actually was, intent on slicing tomatoes with the sharp gestures of someone who considers every knife an argument. The radio, turned low, broadcast local news—something about the commercial port and a new building permit.

“How was the first day?” she asked without turning around.

“Emma was tense. Viola was scandalized by the fact of her own existence.”

“So, everything is normal.”

Lorenzo leaned down to kiss her on the temple. She allowed it with automatic affection, then passed him a plate. “Did you see the new parents in the class?”

He hesitated for a second. “A few.”

“There’s a very elegant mother, or so the class rep told me last year. The one from the Roversi family. Apparently, she lives in that villa on the promontory.”

Lorenzo looked up. “Oh, really?”

Giulia drizzled oil over the salad. “You never know anything about anyone.”

“It’s one of my least appreciated qualities.”

“It's a form of inverted snobbery. You hold gossip in contempt just to feel above it.”

“Or maybe I just have other things to do.”

She looked at him and offered a faint smile. This was still what worked between them: the rapid-fire conversation, the subtle wit, a lexical intimacy that often survives even as other forms of intimacy fade. But as they ate, Lorenzo realized with growing unease that he was holding something back. Not a fact. An impression. And he held onto it for that very reason, the way one holds onto potentially dangerous things—those that seem irrelevant, yet could alter the internal balance of a day.

In the afternoon, he went back to pick up Emma. The school courtyard was full of voices, dragging backpacks, mothers already exhausted, and fathers running late. When he saw Elena Roversi leaning against the side wall with a book in her hands, he felt that slight tightening of the stomach that accompanies unacknowledged anticipation.

She was reading—really reading, or perhaps pretending to, just to withdraw from the adult chatter. The late afternoon sun fell across her neck, catching the glint of a thin chain that disappeared beneath the light fabric of her shirt. She had changed her clothes; she was now wearing sand-colored trousers and a matte silk blouse that the wind molded to her body without indecency—with a precision that was close to indifferent, instead.

It was Emma who ran to Tommaso before even reaching her father. The two children began talking all at once about an assignment, a strict teacher, and a poster about cetaceans. Lorenzo and Elena found themselves drawn together by natural necessity, as if the scene had already decided for them.

“Survival achieved?” he asked.

“It seems so.” Elena closed her book. “Tommaso claims Emma is the only sensible person in his class.”

“A surprisingly mature judgment.”

“I think he just meant she didn't steal his eraser.”

“That explains everything.”

A moment of silence followed. It wasn't awkward; it was, if anything, far too open. Elena slightly raised the book she was holding. “When I don’t want to talk to anyone, I bring a book.”

“Does it work?”

“Almost never. But it’s an elegant way of surrendering.”

Lorenzo glanced at the cover. “Mann.”

“Recognized from the cover, or from the tragic air it gives off?”

“Both.”

She laughed again, and for the second time, that laugh produced an inexplicably physical sensation in him—as if his body were registering it at a higher speed than his mind.

The children asked to stay in the courtyard for five minutes. A school attendant agreed. Lorenzo and Elena moved toward the low wall, from which a strip of sea could be seen between the rooftops.

“Do you live on the promontory?” he asked.

“Yes. On Agave Way.”

“A beautiful view.”

“Exquisite. And almost always useless.”

Lorenzo turned toward her. “Useless?”

“Beautiful things turn into background noise very quickly. It’s one of our specialties.”

That sentence, spoken in a calm voice, hit him more directly than her last. There was a restrained exhaustion in Elena, but of a refined, almost polite sort. Not the exhaustion of someone who complains, but that far more unsettling kind: the weariness of one who has learned to live with lack as if it were a form of weather.

“You talk like a writer,” he said.

“I talk like a woman who spends too much time listening to her own thoughts.”

“Which is almost the same thing.”

She looked down at the courtyard, where Emma and Tommaso were running around a bench. “No. Writers transform. The rest of us just accumulate.”

In the distance, a bell chimed the quarter-hour. An elderly woman crossed the sidewalk carrying a bag of bread. Someone called a child by name. Everything continued as if nothing were happening. And yet, Lorenzo felt with total clarity that something was shifting, ever so slightly, inside him. It wasn't simply that Elena Roversi was attractive. It wasn't that, or at least not only that. It was the way she spoke—as if every sentence had already passed through a zone of omission before reaching the light.

“And you?” she asked. “An accumulator or a transformer?”

“It depends on the day.”

“And today?”

Lorenzo hesitated. “Today, I don’t know yet.”

She looked at him for a moment that seemed longer than it should have been. Then the children came running up, snapping the invisible thread that had stretched between them.

“Dad, can I go to Tommaso’s house on Saturday?” Emma asked.

Lorenzo smiled. “I believe that request needs to pass through another competent authority as well.”

Elena leaned her head toward Tommaso, whose eyes were bright with hope. “We’ll see, sweetheart.”

“Please.”

“We’ll talk about it.”

They exchanged phone numbers to coordinate. It was a normal, inevitable gesture. Yet when Elena spoke her number and Lorenzo repeated it to save it, it seemed to him that this simple administrative act already contained an improper promise.

That evening, after dinner, he found himself on the balcony with a glass of wine, while Giulia corrected assignments in the living room and the girls argued in low voices over a charger. The city was bathed in that blue light that precedes full darkness—a light that in Port Sanvelio always seems to carry a residue of salt, even on the innermost streets. From the sea came the brief siren of a maneuvering ferry. Lorenzo looked toward the promontory. The villas of the upper district were beginning to light up one by one, small private constellations suspended above the city.

He wondered which one was Elena’s house. If the view truly was exquisite and useless. If she read in the evening. If her husband was already home. If she was happy. The question caught him with an unpleasant sharpness. He had no right to ask it, and for that very reason, the act of asking indicated he had already stepped beyond neutrality.

He went back inside. Giulia asked if the wine was good. He said it was. Emma arrived with a form for him to sign for her sports activity. Lorenzo signed it. Life continued to present itself in its domestic form—recognizable, exact.

Later, as he was turning off the hallway light, his phone vibrated. A message from an unsaved number, which he recognized instantly.

“Good evening. It’s Elena, Tommaso’s mother. This is my number, so we have each other's contact info, just for the children.”

Lorenzo stared at those words longer than necessary. There was nothing in them that exceeded mere courtesy. And yet, the simple appearance of her name on the screen produced a variation in his body’s rhythm, as if the tranquil order of the day had just allowed a crack to form.

He replied after a minute, over-calibrating the sentence precisely because he wanted it to sound spontaneous.

“Thanks. It’s Lorenzo, Emma’s father. Perfect, we’ll stay in touch.”

It should have ended there. Instead, the phone lit up almost immediately.

“Port Sanvelio is officially less successful at hiding people now.”

Lorenzo smiled in spite of himself. He stood motionless in the dark hallway, the soft hum of the house around him and that sentence in his hands like a tiny spark, still only seemingly harmless. He understood then, with an almost physical immediacy, that danger never lies in the grand gesture. It lies in the beginning of a confidence. In the moment when two strangers suddenly find a language that belongs only to them.

He wrote: “Maybe it depends on who is looking.”

He waited. The reply arrived a few seconds later.

“Or on who is finally being seen.”

Lorenzo read it once. Then again. In the living room, Giulia turned a page; Emma laughed at a video that Viola pretended not to want to show her; and the house was full of the ordinary sounds of his life. But standing there in the hallway with the phone glowing in his palm, he had the distinct feeling that something had just crossed the border.

He didn't know yet if it was a promise, a temptation, or a ruin. He knew only that, from that moment on, he would recognize her voice even in the silence.

Chapter 2

The Oblique Light of Morning

In the days that followed, Port Sanvelio seemed to Lorenzo the same city it had always been, and yet a place subtly altered — like certain seascapes when the wind shifts but the eye only notices some hours later. The same streets, the same balconies corroded by salt, the hardware shops and bars with their plastic chairs facing the harbor, the same disorderly traffic in front of the schools. And yet everything appeared touched by a different quality of light — more attentive, almost interrogative.

Nothing had happened. He kept telling himself this.

Nothing that truly deserved the name of an event. Two parents had met. They had exchanged pleasantries. Polite messages, tilted only slightly toward a mild complicity. Minor territory, entirely ordinary. Nothing that an adult conscience, trained in responsibility and the precise accounting of existence, should consider threatening.

But the truth, Lorenzo sensed with growing unease, almost never depends on the facts themselves. It depends on the intensity with which one inhabits them.

Thursday morning he arrived at the harbor earlier than usual, the bluish dark of dawn still in his eyes. The quays were almost deserted. Only two fishermen were unloading crates of sole and cod from a low-riding trawler, talking between themselves in rough voices, as if continuing an argument begun years before. The sky above the lighthouse had that milky transparency that precedes full sun, and the smell of the sea — mingled with the metallic scent of wet chains and diesel — entered his lungs with an almost calming force.

He unlocked the office, raised the shutter, switched on the computer. The fluorescent light took a few seconds to settle into an uncertain white. On the desk he found a stack of delivery notes to sign, three estimates, a parts catalogue, and a small mahogany model of an old dinghy that had belonged to his father. The object had always struck him as too decorative to genuinely like, yet he had never found the courage to remove it. Certain inheritances are endured with the same discipline with which one accepts the features of one's own face.

While he was checking the first emails, his phone vibrated.

Not the work phone — the personal one.

He looked at it almost immediately, with an attentiveness that seemed indecent even to himself.

A message from Elena.

"Tommaso forgot his science notebook. Does Emma happen to know if it was left in the classroom?"

Lorenzo read it and felt his body react as though he had received intimate news. The disproportion annoyed him. He let almost three minutes pass before replying — long enough to salvage his dignity, too short to convincingly feign indifference.

"I'll ask her once she's fully awake. At the moment she's communicating exclusively in grunts."

The reply came quickly.

"Understood. Tommaso announced this morning that he wanted to change his identity and become an octopus."

Lorenzo smiled. He pictured Elena in the kitchen — perhaps with a cup of coffee still untouched, her hair gathered in haste, the boy circling the table with unmanageable energy. The image formed with an almost irritating precision. It had no right to exist, and yet there it was.

"If he improves in mathematics, it could be a strategic solution," he wrote.

Three dots. Then:

"With eight arms he'd cheat far more effectively."

Lorenzo looked at the screen longer than necessary. The game was slight, almost childish. But its power lay elsewhere — in the rhythm, in the ease of it, in the fact that a subterranean language was already being built between them, and so quickly. Nothing explicit. Nothing improper. And for precisely that reason, all the more insidious.

Emma confirmed shortly afterward that the notebook had not been left in the classroom, but most likely at a classmate's house where the children had gone for a snack the day before. Lorenzo passed this on. Elena thanked him with a simple line: "You've saved my morning." Then added: "I owe you an emergency school coffee."

Lorenzo set the phone down on the desk and stayed motionless for a moment. It was the most ordinary sentence in the world. The kind of proposal two parents might exchange without anything happening — neither inside nor out. But he felt with perfect clarity the precise point at which that invitation ceased to be casual and began to exist as a possibility.

Sergio came into the office with a fuel filter in his hand. "You look like someone who's just found out he has to pay taxes twice."

Lorenzo looked up too quickly. "If only it were just that."

"Problems?"

"Routine administration."

Sergio set the filter down on the table. "Thing is, routine administration around here always smells like catastrophe."

Lorenzo laughed faintly and returned to work. But Elena's sentence remained there — silent and present — while he signed documents, called a boatyard in Rimini, and checked the end-of-month deadlines. By mid-morning, no longer able to pretend otherwise even to himself, he wrote to her:

"I'll take the emergency coffee. But only if the school alert level genuinely warrants it.”

The reply came after seven minutes. Long enough for him to understand that she too, perhaps, was measuring the distance between the permitted and the desired.

"Tomorrow then, after dropping the children. The alert level will certainly be artificial, but dignified."

Lorenzo looked at his watch. Then at the screen. Then at his watch again.

He wasn't doing anything wrong, he told himself. A coffee. In the morning. In some ordinary bar. With a mother from his daughter's class. Nothing. And yet the mere idea moved through his chest like a secret.

That evening at home, Giulia spoke at length about the new head teacher, about departmental meetings, about a difficult boy in the second year of middle school who wrote beautiful essays and never handed in his homework. Lorenzo listened with his usual affectionate attentiveness, responding at the right moments, contributing where needed, but he noticed he was divided. One part of him was there, seated at the table, cutting bread for Emma and reminding Viola not to use her phone during dinner. Another part was waiting for the following day with an anomalous, almost adolescent anticipation, and this shamed him.

After the girls had gone to bed, Giulia remained on the sofa with her legs tucked beneath her, reading a collection of essays. Her face was tired but still beautiful — a rational kind of beauty that had always appealed to him: the broad forehead, the clear gaze, the mouth capable of turning severe from an excess of precision rather than from coldness. Lorenzo sat down beside her.

"You're quiet," said Giulia without immediately lifting her eyes from the book.

"Tired."

"More than usual."

"September."

She closed the volume and studied him more carefully. "You have that look of a man thinking about something he doesn't want to name."

Lorenzo attempted a smile. "You've just described half of the male sex."

"The other half doesn't think at all."

The exchange made them both smile, but the smile faded almost at once. Giulia placed a hand on his knee. "Is everything all right at the harbor?"

"Yes."

"With the girls?"

"Yes."

"With us?"

The question arrived just like that, without preamble, with the bare simplicity that certain phrases carry in long marriages. It contained no accusation. Only the need — perhaps belated — to test the integrity of a structure.

Lorenzo looked at her. He could have answered in a thousand half-true ways. Instead he said only: "We're both tired, I think."

Giulia nodded slowly. "We've been tired for years."

There was no bitterness in her voice. Rather a clarity that was almost moving. For a moment Lorenzo felt the impulse to hold her, to say something more honest, to admit at least the subtle confusion he felt growing inside him. But he didn't. He didn't yet know what was happening, and already the not-knowing felt like a fault.

The following morning, after dropping Emma off, he saw Elena almost immediately.

She was leaning against the side wall of the school with a paper cup in her hand, as though she had anticipated the exact spot where the nine o'clock light would render her most distinct. She wore a stone-colored trench coat left open over a dark dress, simple, that followed the lines of her body with a sober precision. No conspicuous detail. And yet her way of standing still produced around her a kind of separate space — as if the courtyard's disorder and the murmur of parents flowed around her without truly touching her.

"Dignified alert level?" Lorenzo asked, drawing closer.

Elena raised her cup. "I've already made a start on my own, but I'm happy to repeat the exercise."

"I'm afraid that's the only kind of heroism I practice with any consistency."

She nodded toward the bar on the corner — a small place with three tables outside and a window display full of pastries that gleamed a little too brightly. "Five minutes?"

"Five."

It took them forty.

At first they talked about what would have been reasonable: school, the children, homework, the chaos of afternoon activities. Tommaso swam reluctantly and was devoted to documentaries about sharks; Emma, Lorenzo explained, had decided some months ago that when she grew up she would become either a zoological illustrator or a pirate, depending on the day. Elena laughed and said the two professions were compatible.

They sat outside. The sea was visible at the end of the street, between two buildings, like a pale blade. The wind stirred the paper napkins and carried to them the smell of roasted coffee, old sunscreen still lingering in the air from the season just ended, dried seaweed, scooter engines. Port Sanvelio had a talent for blending the beautiful with the shabby in a single frame, and that mixture, Lorenzo thought, resembled her.

"Do you work?" he asked at a certain point.

"I used to do literary translations. Much less now."

"By choice?"

"By circumstance." Elena traced the rim of her cup with one fingernail. "When children are small, everything contracts. Sometimes naturally. Sometimes because others decide that natural is what it is."

Lorenzo felt the precision of that sentence. "Others?"

Elena raised her eyes to him. "Families. Husbands. The invisible economies of marriage. Choose whichever definition suits you best."

"You don't strike me as someone who lets herself be easily defined by others."

"That's the advantage of appearances. People always overestimate the freedom of composed women."

Lorenzo looked at her in silence. Along the pavement an old man passed carrying a bag of clams still dripping. From inside the bar came the metallic sound of the coffee machine. Everything seemed concrete, ordinary — and for precisely that reason the subtext of their sentences carried more weight.

"And your husband?" he asked carefully.

Elena turned her cup between her hands. "Alberto works in the commercial port."

"I don't think I know him."

"He knows almost everyone. It's one of his specialities."

There was something imperceptibly sharp in that "almost everyone." Lorenzo noticed it and didn't press. Instead he said: "I'm on the wrong side of the harbor. The side that still pretends to have a soul."

Elena smiled. "Souls are overrated. Facades last longer."

"You often speak as though you're quoting from a book no one else has read."

"It's possible I'm still writing it in my head."

The conversation then took a different turn, less guarded. They talked about books, about seaside cities, about how certain places compel a particular form of nostalgia even when one has never left them. Elena spoke of having studied in Bologna and of believing, at twenty-five, that she would never return to the Adriatic except for brief summer visits. Then life had changed its geography for her — or perhaps others' choices and her own renunciations had changed it. She didn't explain it fully, but Lorenzo understood enough to sense that her return to the sea had not been exactly a free preference.

"Do you miss Bologna?" he asked.

Elena gave it genuine thought. "I miss the woman I thought I would become there."

The sentence struck him with the quiet force of deep truths. He sat still, the teaspoon suspended between his fingers.

"Does it not happen to you?" she asked. "Feeling nostalgia not for a place or a person, but for a version of yourself that at a certain point you simply stopped visiting?"

Lorenzo smiled faintly, but not from lightness. "Yes. It happens to me."

"And who was he?"

"Someone who still believed that choices had a moral duration."

Elena looked at him as though the answer had surprised her. Not for its content, but because she had recognized in him a fissure similar to her own.

"That's a sentence from a dangerous man," she said quietly.

"Or a tired one."

"Sometimes they're the same thing."

The wind lifted a page of the newspaper left on a nearby table. Lorenzo saw a strand of hair escape Elena's clip and come to rest against her cheek. Without thinking too carefully — or perhaps thinking too quickly — he extended a hand as if to point out the gesture to her. He didn't actually touch her. His fingers stopped a breath from her skin. But that near-contact was enough to interrupt the rhythm of the morning.

Elena didn't move.

She didn't pull back. She didn't lean in. She simply remained there, her gaze steady on his, while between his fingers and her face a minuscule distance stretched — excessive, already weighted with everything that should not have existed.

It was she who broke the moment. She raised her hand to her hair and smoothed it herself, with a slow gesture.

"We should go," she said.

"Yes."

They rose almost together. Lorenzo paid for the coffees before she could object. They walked toward their cars along the pavement encroached by pine roots. Their steps stayed close without touching. At the traffic light, waiting for green, Elena said:

"This isn't a good idea."

Lorenzo looked at her. "The coffee?"

"This tone."

"What tone?"

She smiled faintly, but there was already a weariness in the smile. "The one that feels like intimacy too soon."

Lorenzo could have denied it. It would have been easy. Instead he chose the riskier, more minimal honesty. "You're right."

Elena nodded, as though the fact that he hadn't denied it made things simultaneously worse and more bearable.

"We have children," she said.

"I know."

"Lives."

"I know that too."

The light turned green. Neither of them moved immediately.

"Then perhaps we should remind ourselves of that," she concluded.

"Perhaps."

They crossed. At their cars they said goodbye with an almost austere simplicity. But as Elena opened her door, she turned, just slightly.

"All the same," she said, "I miss the sea at Bologna very much.”

Lorenzo laughed, and that laugh lightened only in appearance what had just taken place.

The day continued like all the others and like no other. At the harbor the noise of metal seemed sharper to him, the slap of water against the fenders, the cry of the gulls — as if every sound had acquired a new clarity. Toward evening he received a call from his mother, who asked whether he would come for Sunday lunch. He said yes. He signed a contract for the winter storage of a sailing boat. He argued with Sergio about a faulty crane. He put petrol in the car. He bought bread. All while one part of him kept returning to that table, to the oblique morning light, to the way Elena had said: This isn't a good idea.

Sometimes it is precisely the sentences of renunciation that carry the highest power of invitation.

That evening, while they were clearing the table, Giulia told him that Viola had received an excellent mark in art history. Emma wanted to bring the class goldfish home from the science room. Lorenzo listened, contributed, smiled at the right moments. But Giulia, who knew his silences better than anyone, fixed him at a certain point over the rim of her glass.

"Are you by any chance thinking of how to avoid the goldfish?"

"I'm working on a diplomatic strategy."

"You don't look like you're concentrating on the goldfish."

Lorenzo set his plate in the sink. "I'm just tired."

Giulia nodded, but not entirely convinced.

Later, in bed, she fell asleep first. Lorenzo lay awake listening to the breathing of the house and the distant traffic drifting in from the seafront like a muted echo. He thought about how fragile, in the end, was the idea that lives break apart because of great events. More often they tilt, beginning from details that are almost invisible: a way of looking, a sentence spoken too well, a coffee taken in the wrong place at the wrong hour.

The phone on the nightstand remained dark. And yet he felt its presence the way one senses, in the dark, the proximity of something that might call you by name.

He didn't write to Elena that night.

It was she who wrote the following morning, at six forty-eight.

"I dreamed the sea was inside the school. The children were having lessons with water up to their ankles and it seemed perfectly normal. I think it's your fault, or Port Sanvelio's."

Lorenzo read the message still half asleep, with Giulia beside him and the first light coming through the shutters. His heart beat in a way that made no sense.

He looked at his wife sleeping — her calm profile, her hair spread across the pillow. Then he looked again at those words. There was still nothing a tribunal of good sense could condemn. And yet there was already enough to change the temperature of the blood.

He replied simply:

"Be careful. In certain cities the sea gets in everywhere, then never leaves."

He pressed send and stayed motionless.

In the courtyard a moped started with a sharp crack. Someone raised a shutter. The day was beginning. Life, with its logic and its obligations, was returning to reclaim everyone to their proper place.

But Lorenzo understood, with a clarity that left him no further room for evasion, that the place he had occupied for years had just begun to feel too small.

Chapter 3

The Things Left Unsaid

In the days that followed, Lorenzo began to measure time in a new way — almost ridiculous for a man of his age, and for that very reason harder to master. No longer by the deliveries at the harbor, the end-of-month deadlines, the school timetable or the Sunday visits to his mother; but by the rhythm with which Elena's name appeared on his phone screen, or with which he imagined he might encounter her at the green gate, at pickup, in the brief interstices that adult life still concedes to chance — not knowing that chance, sometimes, is merely another form of desire.

He was ashamed of it just enough to know he was already compromised, though in a way still invisible to others and perhaps, in part, to himself as well.

Their messages continued — at first with the caution of those who sense danger and try to name it through irony, then with a more alarming naturalness. Nothing that exceeded what was permitted. A forgotten notebook, an overly strict teacher, the sudden change to the physical education timetable, a classmate's birthday, a sudden downpour along the seafront. And yet, with each exchange, Lorenzo felt growing that subterranean current which makes certain conversations more alive than their content.

One evening Elena wrote to him while he was still in the office at the harbor, alone, the fluorescent light burning on the desk and the sound of the wind making the sheet metal of the adjacent warehouse tremble faintly.

"Tommaso has decided that when he grows up he'll either be a marine biologist or a gentleman thief. He says it will depend on how school goes."

Lorenzo laughed to himself, phone in hand, and that laugh, in that empty room, struck him as a gesture of greater intimacy than could legitimately be attributed to a text message.

"Emma declared today that sharks are more reliable than people. I think it's a premature judgment, but not entirely without foundation."

Less than a minute passed.

"Sharks at least don't lie about their own nature."

That sentence, so slight in appearance, stayed with him for a long time. Not because it contained anything explicitly allusive, but for the shadow it opened behind it. Lorenzo stared at the screen. He could have replied with a quip and closed off the meaning. Instead he wrote:

"It depends. Some human beings don't lie. They simply stay silent."

The typing indicator appeared and disappeared twice, as if Elena were searching for the right distance between herself and him.

"Silence is the most elegant form of lying," came the reply at last.

Lorenzo felt a small interior shift — something close to the certainty that this woman was not speaking in the abstract. That every sentence, every irony, every apparently suspended remark was in reality the visible tip of a darker, denser matter that he didn't know and already wanted to know too much.

"Are you speaking from experience?" he asked.

This time the reply was slow. Five minutes. Eight. Twelve. Long enough for him to think he had crossed a line. Then the phone lit up.

"I speak because I learned early that in families one almost never lies directly. One omits. One redirects. One makes things bearable."

Lorenzo read it several times.

"And does it work?"

"Until it stops.”

He wanted to ask her more. Who had forced her to learn it. What, in her life, had been left unspoken long enough to become distorted. But the phone was not the place for real questions, and the two of them had not yet earned the right to ask them aloud. Or perhaps they didn't want to earn it too quickly, sensing that beyond that threshold the ground would change.

That evening he came home with a silent irritation that had nothing to do with traffic or work. Giulia noticed it while she was filling the water bottles in the kitchen.

"Did you argue with someone?"

"No."

"With yourself, then."

Lorenzo looked up, and for a moment was tempted to tell her something true — at least in an indirect form. Not the full truth, which would have been impossible, and perhaps absurd, given that there was still nothing to confess — but at least the unease, the increasingly sharp sense that his life was proceeding within an order he moved through with competence but no longer with conviction.

Instead he said: "I'm just tired."

Giulia rested her elbows on the table and studied him. "You know there's a point beyond which 'I'm tired' stops being an answer and becomes a defensive strategy?"

Lorenzo attempted a smile. "You're married to a very predictable man. It's natural you'd develop analytical tools."

"You're not predictable," she said with a calm that surprised him. "That, in fact, is the problem. You never have been. You've simply learned to appear so."

The sentence struck him harder than he let show.

Giulia turned back toward the sink and resumed arranging plates and glasses. Everything continued with its usual domestic discipline, and yet that brief fissure remained between them — fine, but alive.

In the days that followed, Elena appeared at school twice a few minutes late — just enough time to prevent any real exchange, but not enough to erase the taste of the waiting. The first time Lorenzo saw her crossing the pavement almost at a run, sunglasses on, a taut set to her mouth. Tommaso walked beside her trying to tell her something; she nodded, listened, but with that fraction of attention that betrays a mind elsewhere. When she noticed Lorenzo, she slowed almost imperceptibly.

"Difficult morning?" he asked.

Elena took off her sunglasses. "One of many."

"Nothing serious?"

"It depends on what meaning you give to the word serious."

She said it quietly, without self-pity, but immediately added: "Sorry, that was rude. I didn't sleep much."

"It happens."

Their hands brushed as Tommaso tried to show Emma a sheet of paper covered in badly drawn but supremely confident fish. The touch was minimal, perhaps accidental, but Lorenzo's body registered it with humiliating precision. Elena withdrew her hand immediately — not sharply, but with the disciplined swiftness of someone who had felt the same thing and had no intention of acknowledging it.

"See you at pickup," she said.

It was not a promise. Not yet. But for the entire morning Lorenzo waited for those four words as though they contained a private appointment.

At pickup, however, Elena didn't come. It was an elderly woman who collected Tommaso — tall, in a dark blue coat, with Elena's features hardened into an older severity.

"I'm the grandmother," she explained with formal courtesy.

Lorenzo nodded, Emma said goodbye to Tommaso, and the scene closed there. But that small deviation left him with a disproportionate sense of loss. He understood then, with a clarity that was far from flattering, that he had already grown accustomed to her presence as a point of orientation.

That evening, at twenty-two sixteen, a message arrived.

"Sorry about today. My older son had a problem at school and I had to rush to him."

Lorenzo was sitting on the bed while Giulia in the bathroom removed her makeup in front of the mirror with slow, automatic movements.

"Nothing serious, I hope."

"No. An almost-fight which, knowing fourteen-year-olds, is the equivalent of a peace treaty."

He imagined Elena in another house — perhaps already in her room, perhaps with a low light on the nightstand and the rest of the family dispersed through the rooms. He felt the sudden, unreasonable need to know what her face looked like at that hour, without the day's composure, without the filter of public gestures.

"Are you tired?"

"Very."

A pause followed. Then:

"You?"

Lorenzo looked at the half-open bathroom door. "Yes. But not from work."

The message stayed on read for a few seconds.

"Neither am I," wrote Elena.

This time the silence that followed was more eloquent than any sentence. Lorenzo didn't reply immediately. He could already feel, within those three words, the dangerous birth of a shared territory — the implicit acknowledgment that the tiredness they were describing had nothing to do with obligations, but with something more intimate, more structural, perhaps more ancient.

When Giulia came out of the bathroom, he still had the phone in his hand.

"Work?" she asked, drying her face with a small towel.

"A client."

Giulia nodded without conviction. She got into bed, switched off the lamp on her side, and turned onto her side. The darkness received them with its usual efficiency.

Lorenzo waited a few minutes before writing:

"Sometimes I have the feeling that days are full of noise just to stop anyone from hearing what lies beneath."

Elena's reply came almost immediately, as if she too had been waiting for that sentence.

"And what lies beneath?"

Lorenzo sat with his thumb motionless on the screen. The question struck him as both excessive and inevitable. It was the first time she had openly offered him a threshold. He didn't know whether crossing it would be an act of honesty or of cowardice.

He wrote only:

"I don't know yet."

A moment passed.

"Perhaps you do," she replied. "Perhaps you just don't want to say it."

That night he slept badly. He dreamed of a black sea, almost still, and an empty quay along which he walked searching for someone whose face he couldn't make out. On waking, the dream left behind a sensation of restrained urgency, of desire without a scene.

Saturday brought a birthday party. A play center on the old harbor, with nautical-themed balloons, tables that were too small, lukewarm pizza and the exhausted murmur of parents condemned to a semi-festive sociability. Lorenzo went with Emma; Giulia was occupied at school for an unscheduled open day. Elena arrived shortly after with Tommaso and her older son Nicolò — tall, lean, already marked by that adolescent beauty which always seems to be at war with itself.

The venue looked out onto the harbor through windows fogged by the sun. Outside, the boats rocked gently in the greenish water; inside, the children's voices bounced off the walls like startled flocks. Lorenzo watched Elena as she took off her coat, left in a thin dark wool dress that followed her body with an almost provocative precision while never quite crossing into display. Her neck bare, her wrists bare, a slender chain, no other ornament. She struck him as beautiful, and immediately afterward he disliked himself for the banality of that thought, which did no justice to what truly unsettled him about her — not the beauty itself, but the quality of secrecy that accompanied it.

They greeted each other with the caution of those who know they are being observed without actually being so. Other parents, other mothers, two fathers talking about football too loudly. The setting protected them and at the same time constrained them.

Mid-afternoon, while the children were being entertained by a party host dressed as a pirate who looked as though he hated himself, Lorenzo found himself beside Elena in front of a table of paper cups.

"Nicolò seems older than his age," he said.

"Because he does everything he can to appear so."

"And does he manage it?"

"Only on the days when he hates the world a little less than usual."

Lorenzo smiled. "That seems like a reasonable start for adolescence."

"Adolescence is a border war fought indoors," she replied.

"With the occasional grenade on social media."

They spoke without holding each other's gaze too long, as though prolonged eye contact might already be excessive. And yet every sentence, precisely because it held itself back, acquired a growing intimacy.

“Speaking of wars,” Lorenzo said, “have you and sleep signed an armistice yet?”

Elena slightly raised her glass. “A three-hour ceasefire last night.”

“Generous.”

“More so than my marriage.”

The sentence escaped her with a sort of absent naturalness, as if it had slipped past an internal guard for only a second. Elena realized it the moment she’d said it. She lowered her eyes. Lorenzo felt a tightness in his chest.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have.”

“You don’t have to apologize to me.”

“No. That’s exactly the problem.”

For the first time between them, the silence became openly dangerous. Lorenzo set down his glass. “Elena…”

She gave a small shake of her head. “No. Let it be.”

But the way she said it was almost the opposite of a request. They remained close, both facing the room where the children were screaming while an unbearable song blasted from the speakers at an excessive volume. Outside the windows, the sea had turned the color of lead, and the sky was beginning to haze over.

“Are you happy?” Lorenzo asked, not knowing if he had the right.

Elena didn’t answer immediately. She simply watched the harbor. When she spoke, her voice was calm—almost too calm.

“I think I’ve become very good at not asking myself the question.”

Lorenzo stood still.

“And you?”

The question struck him with a cruel clarity. For the first time, someone was asking him without irony, without superficiality, without the subtext that the answer had to be socially acceptable. He realized he didn't want to lie.

“No.”

Elena closed her eyes for an instant, as if that single syllable had hit her with physical force.

A moment later, however, a man’s voice reached them from behind.

“Elena.”

Lorenzo turned. A tall man in his mid-forties—elegant in that overly conscious way of someone used to being liked and using his self-control as a badge of power—was approaching with a dark blue coat draped over his shoulders, his phone still in his hand. His face was handsome and symmetrical; his smile was impeccable, but cold.

“I thought I’d find you here,” the man said.

Elena composed herself in an instant. “Alberto. You’re early.”

He leaned down toward her for a kiss on the cheek that felt less like an endearment and more like the staking of a claim. Then he looked at Lorenzo.

“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

“Lorenzo Valenti,” he said, extending his hand. “My daughter is in the same class as Tommaso.”

“Alberto Roversi.”

The handshake was correct, dry, and too calculated to be neutral. Lorenzo immediately felt something unsettling about the man—not an explicit threat, but the kind of presence that occupies a room with the easy entitlement of an owner.

“Emma speaks of Tommaso often,” Lorenzo said.

"A good sign." Alberto smiled, but his gaze lingered on Elena for a fraction of a second too long. "I hope I’m not interrupting anything."

"No," she replied, much too quickly. "We were just looking at the harbour."

"A fascinating itinerary."

It was a harmless phrase, yet the tone carried a hidden edge.

Nicolò appeared behind his father, took the phone Alberto was holding out to him, and left without a word. Tommaso, meanwhile, ran over to show him a plastic saber. Alberto stroked the boy’s hair distractedly, his mind already elsewhere.

"We have to leave soon," he told Elena. "We have dinner at my sister's at seven."

Elena nodded. "Yes."

Lorenzo observed this brief exchange and recognized a dynamic he knew without ever having experienced it firsthand: command masquerading as organization; a decision delivered as a natural fact.

A few moments later, while Alberto was talking to another father near the entrance, Elena managed to find herself beside Lorenzo for a few seconds.

"I'm sorry," she said in a low voice.

"For what?"

"For everything I'm letting you see."

Lorenzo looked at her. "Maybe you aren't letting me see it. Maybe you're just stopping the act."

Elena breathed in slowly, then stared at him with such exposed intensity that he felt an almost physical impulse to touch her arm. He didn't. Not there.

"This is the point where people start making mistakes," she whispered.

"Or start telling the truth."

"The two aren't mutually exclusive."

When she left—husband in front, children behind—Lorenzo stood watching her cross the room full of balloons and confetti as if she were exiting a scene that didn't belong to her at all. The contrast between that childish setting and the tension she carried in her body seemed almost unbearable.

That night, they didn't write to each other.

Sunday was full of family: lunch at his mother’s, an overcooked roast, small talk with his sister. Emma fell asleep in the car on the way back, and Viola remained locked in a brooding adolescent silence that Giulia interpreted as hostility, but which Lorenzo saw as a plea to be allowed to grow up without too many interrogations. Everything was normal. Too normal.

Only at twelve minutes past eleven, when the house was finally immersed in silence and he was about to turn off his phone, did a message arrive from Elena.

“There are days when I feel like I’ve spent years playing a part written by others.”

Lorenzo felt his heart quicken. He replied almost immediately.

“And today?”

“Today, I forgot a line.”

He closed his eyes for a moment.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Fifteen minutes passed. Then:

“No. Yes. I don’t know.”

Immediately after, a second message arrived.

“Are you ever able to say what it is you’re truly missing?”

Lorenzo looked up at the dark ceiling. Beside him, Giulia breathed softly in her sleep.

He wrote:

“No. But lately, I’m beginning to feel it.”

Elena replied instantly this time.

“Neither am I.”

It was late. Too late for two people who were, officially, saying nothing to each other. But there was already enough in that mutual recognition to make the night feel different.

Lorenzo could have stopped. He should have. Instead, he wrote:

“And what is it you feel?”

The silence lasted a long time. So long that he feared he had pushed too far. Then a brief, almost skeletal response appeared.

“That for a long time now, no one has truly looked at me.”

Lorenzo sat motionless, the phone heavy in his hands.

In that sentence, everything was there: the marriage, the loneliness, the desire, the hunger to exist once more in someone’s eyes. And there, with a dangerous clarity, was also what he himself had been doing for days, almost without admitting it: looking at her.

He wrote only: “I see you.”

He pressed send. Immediately after, he felt the violence of the gesture. Not because