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looks and nothing for comfort. Was that really the way I thought? Really the way my home was? Had Alex made me that way?
    Confused, I sat up again. I sat for a long time on that smart, hard sofa, staring out the windows as night fell. Staring at the twinkling lights out along the lake, the little signals that life went on for some people. But not for me.
    Self-pity overwhelmed my doubts and I began to cry again. I was truly a woman alone.
    Despite the sofa’s hardness, I must have fallen asleep, because I awoke with the dawn, stiff and swollen eyed, filled with doubt.
    I got up, took a shower, dressed, and went to visit my local police precinct.
    I had never read the police report of the accident; I hadn’t been able to bear to see the details in print that made it all too real. Now I needed to know.
    The kindly officer in charge summoned up the details on the computer and gave me a printout. The report said there were no other vehicles involved; Alex’s car had simply aquaplaned on the wet road and hit a tree. He was already pronounced dead and in the ambulance on his way to the hospital when the police finally reached me. Matt’s name and address were on the report, along with that of a woman listed under next of kin as “fiancée.” My own name had been added later, with the word “wife” after it.
    So now I knew that what Jammy had said was true. There was no mystery about Alex’s death. The mystery had been his life. And I didn’t want to know about that anymore.
    There was a weight like a lump of ice in my chest. Jammy and Matt, my friends, had tried to protect me from knowing about my cheating husband. They knew I would grieve for him, but they’d expected me to recover—slowly, it’s true—and that sooner or later I would pick up the threads of a normal life again. Instead, I had wasted two years grieving for a man who had been about to dump me for another woman.
    Deceit is insidious; it crept around my heart, took over my mind, made me doubt my every moment spent with Alex.
    I thought again about that elusive quality called happiness, about Jon-Boy and Rome. And about my long-neglected house in Amalfi. About finally facing my ghosts there.
    I hurried back to the apartment. I was about to change my life completely. I called the real estate agent and told her to put the apartment on the market and that I wanted a fast sale. Then I called Jammy.
    “When do we leave for Italy?” I said.

SEVEN

Lamour
    So here we are in Rome, just Jammy and me. I almost felt like that little girl again, stepping off the plane and driving into the Eternal City, past the monuments and ancient buildings, the grand avenues and the jumble of twisting little streets thronged with traffic and people. It all reminded me again why I loved this place. In most cities you need to go to a museum to discover its history, but in Rome you
live
with it. It’s on the streets where colossal crumbled statues lie where they have rested for centuries. It’s in the
fontanelle,
the drinking fountains carved into stone walls flowing with water from aqueducts built by the ancient Romans. It’s in the seven hills that make up the city and in the old churches, some splendidly ornate, decorated by a triumph of artists. And some deceptively simple, still used every day by the locals, and with sometimes an unexpected Michelangelo sculpture or a fresco by Raphael, a Torrite mosaic, or a Bernini fountain to make you gasp. It’s in the grand piazzas, like the Piazza Navona, layered higher and higher through the centuries to prevent flooding, though even as late as the eighteenth century it was still being frozen and used for winter ice skating. You live daily with history in sight of the great dome of St. Peter’s, as well as in the massive old plane trees that shade the streets and in the gossipy old cafés and the bars. There’s something in the air in Rome that I swear adds a skip of excitement to your step, the way itused to when I was a kid,