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it was almost indistinguishable from work; we always beat the crowds to the beach, always preplotted our route through Great Adventure, never went to a restaurant that wasn’t researched beforehand. And I’d always done the same. But not anymore.
    Now I’d live boldly, like there was no tomorrow. On the plane ride from New York to Rome, I’d spent hours composing a big, sprawling bucket list, enumerating the many things I wanted to see before Lights Out. Top on the list was The Eyes of My Children, but that was one that would have to wait. Below that were a slew of travel destinations, many of which I reached that August—the canals of Venice, the Champs-Élysées, the royal palace of Vienna—and many farther flung. Then, too, there were plenty of items, each one more impossible than the last, that weren’t so much things to see as ways to be, such as: Always Stop to Look at Sparkles in the Sidewalk and Sleep Only When Strictly Necessary and Read Absolutely Everything.
    Sticking your nose in a book might seem like the very opposite of grabbing life by the balls, but reading had always been one of my great loves, and it was one of the things I was most terrified to lose. Sure, there were always audiobooks, but the holy communion of bringing your eyes to paper and sweeping them across the page, left to right, left to right, left to right, the rhythm of that dance, the quiet of it, the sound of the page turning, the look of crinkled covers stained with the coffee you were drinking when you read that chapter that changed your life—you didn’t get any of that when listening to an audiobook, and I wanted as much of that as I could get, while I still could.
    I didn’t quite manage to read absolutely everything that August, but I did read absolutely all of Anna Karenina . And like magic, the reading of that book gave rise to real-life adventures. In particular, romances.
    I was sitting on a bench next to a streetlight in Rome’s Piazza Navona one evening, reading the chapter where Vronsky follows Anna to St. Petersburg, when I heard a man’s voice next to me.
    “Oh, that’s a good one.” The voice spoke in flawless English, with just enough of an Italian accent to be alluring.
    I looked up and saw a thin, olive-complected man who seemed to be in his late twenties standing over me. It was nighttime so I couldn’t quite make out the color of his eyes but they were dark, like his lashes and his hair, cropped short. In his clean, unwrinkled guayabera, with the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi behind him, he looked like he was on a photo shoot for a spread in Italian Vogue .
    “Are you a lover of Tolstoy?” I said in what I hoped was flawless Italian, with just enough of an American accent to be alluring.
    An hour later, we were sitting at a two-top at Bar della Pace, drinking vino rosso and discussing Russian novelists. The tall, dark stranger, Benedetto, a doctor of philosophy in the field of medical bioengineering, hailed from a little town outside of Venice and was in Rome just for the night, taking care of some business related to his degree.
    It occurred to me that I might have found the man not only of my dreams, but of my parents’ too. After he’d paid for our drinks, I waited for an invitation back to his hotel room (which I was pretty sure I’d decline since even handsome doctors of philosophy can be serial killers), but no invitation was issued. Instead he insisted on walking me to the door of the apartment where I was staying with Aunt Rita, Marisa, and my cousins. In the cobblestoned alley in front of the building, he handed me a slip of paper with his cell phone number, urged me to call him in a few days, and then pressed his lips to mine in a gentle, lingering kiss.
    I succeeded in waiting two days before calling him, which I thought demonstrated pretty spectacular self-control. He was not just a gentleman, but an Italian gentleman, and those are the rarest breed. So when he invited me up north, to his