Chapter 3: A Desperate Hope
The neon sign from the bar across the street blinked a rhythmic, crimson glow into the room. Off. Off. It painted the ceiling in a slow, artificial heartbeat. Drake lay on the lumpy single bed, still wearing his shoes, his hands laced behind his head. The smell of the room—stale coffee grounds, cheap lemony cleaner, and the ghost of a thousand transient occupants—was suddenly unbearable. It was the smell of rootlessness.
His mind was a needle stuck in a groove, replaying the same seconds on a loop.
The warmth of her mouth. The cool slide of her tears. The terrifying, practiced grace of her walk towards that door. The final, quiet click.
He sat up abruptly, the springs complaining. The half-packed suitcase yawned open on the bed, a tangle of wrinkled t-shirts and socks. His camera sat on the wobbly nightstand next to the chipped mug of forgotten espresso. He picked it up, scrolling back through the day’s shots. There she was, leaning against the sun-warmed wall, sketching. He’d caught the exact moment she’d glanced up at him, her concentration softened by something else—surprise, maybe, or a dawning affection. It was a good photo. Honest. It felt now like a photograph of a stranger.
He tossed the camera aside and grabbed his map from the floor. It was well-used, soft at the creases, dotted with his own penciled notes: ‘good panini’, ‘broken fountain’, ‘quiet spot’. His finger traced the route from the Borghese Gardens to the trattoria, then wandered into a warren of streets near the Tiber. He found the piazza. It wasn’t even named on his tourist map; it was just a blank, beige space.
Using a blunt pencil from the nightstand, he drew a careful circle around that blank space. It looked ridiculous. A target with nothing at its center.
Logic, a distant and uninteresting voice, told him it was over. She was a closed book in a language he couldn’t read. The man in the suit, the crest on the door, the voice she used with ‘Charles’—it all screamed a life of barriers he couldn’t scale.
But then he thought of the sketchbook. The raw, unguarded lines of his own face as she saw it. She had shown him that. She had kissed him like that was the last true thing she’d ever get to do. He owed something to the guy in that drawing. That guy, he felt, would at least try.
Dawn was a faint, gray suggestion when he gave up on sleep. He splashed cold water on his face, the pipes groaning in the walls. He didn’t bother changing. He just grabbed his camera and left, the map folded in his back pocket.
The Rome of 5 AM was a different city. The trash trucks rumbled through narrow streets, swallowing the detritus of the night. Shopkeepers hosed down sidewalks, the water swirling around cigarette butts and bottle caps. The air was cool and carried the sharp, clean scent of wet stone and, from somewhere, baking bread. It was a practical, unromantic city, going about its business.
He walked without hurry, retracing their steps from memory. The fountain with the mossy lion was silent, its basin filled with murky water. The bar with the orange cake was shuttered, metal grates pulled tight. It felt like following the trail of a ghost.
He entered the small, elegant piazza just as the first true light of sun gilded the highest window ledge. It was utterly empty. The grand door, painted a deep green, was closed. No crest was visible in the flat morning light, just a polished brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. He stood on the opposite side, leaning against a wall, trying to look like a man waiting for a friend, or a photographer captivated by the dawn light on architecture.
Minutes ticked by. An old woman with a small dog shuffled through. A delivery van double-parked, unloaded crates of mineral water with a grating racket, and left. The piazza returned to silence.
He was a fool. A monumental, staring fool. The hope that had propelled him here began to curdle into a sharp embarrassment. What had he imagined? That she’d slip out at dawn for a cappuccino, still in her blue dress? That she’d see him and run into his arms, the spell of her other life broken?
A figure emerged not from the green door, but from a smaller, adjacent service entrance. It was the man from last night. The suit was different—a charcoal gray today—but the posture was identical: erect, observant, impersonal. He carried a black leather folder. His eyes swept the piazza in a professional, disinterested arc and landed on Drake without a flicker of recognition. They held for a second too long.
Drake’s heart hammered against his ribs. He pretended to adjust a setting on his camera, pointing it vaguely upward at a balcony.
When he dared look back, the man was walking briskly across the cobblestones directly towards him. There was no avoiding it.
“Can I help you, sir?” The man’s English was flawless, his tone courteous but utterly devoid of warmth. It was the voice of a human wall.
“No. Just, uh, taking some morning shots. The light’s good.” Drake’s own voice sounded horribly young and American to his ears.
“This is a private residential square. Photography of the buildings is discouraged.” The man didn’t gesture, didn’t smile. He simply stated a fact.
“Right. Sorry. I didn’t see a sign.”
“There is none.” The implication was clear: the privacy was assumed by people who knew, and enforced by people like him. The man’s eyes dropped to Drake’s camera, then back to his face. “You were here last evening.”
It wasn’t a question.
Drake felt a chill that had nothing to do with the morning air. “I was walking a friend home.”
“I see.” The man’s gaze was analytical, stripping away layers. He saw the backpacker’s clothes, the scuffed shoes, the camera that was good but not professional-grade. He saw everything Drake was and everything he was not. “That… acquaintance… is no longer in Rome. She departed early this morning for family obligations abroad.”
The words were delivered with clean, surgical precision. A statement of fact designed to terminate a line of inquiry.
She departed. Drake felt the finality of it, heavy and cold, in his gut. Family obligations abroad. The official story. The lie that would smother whatever truth had sparked between them in the gallery, at the fountain, in the trattoria.
“Okay,” Drake said, because there was nothing else to say.
“I would advise you to enjoy the many public wonders of our city. They are more suitable for photography.” The man gave a tiny, nod-like motion that was not quite a bow, turned on his heel, and walked away, the sound of his polished shoes unnaturally loud in the quiet piazza.
Drake stood there, exposed and foolish. The sun was fully up now, warming the stones. The magic was gone, burned away by the practical light of day. The green door remained sealed. He had his answer. It wasn’t a whispered confession or a tearful goodbye. It was a polite, brutal dismissal delivered by a man in a charcoal suit.
He walked back to Termini not seeing anything, the map a useless weight in his pocket. The station was a chaos of shouting, rolling suitcases, and garbled announcements. He bought a ticket for the next train north to Florence. It left in two hours. The transaction took thirty seconds.
Back in the hotel room, he packed the rest of his things with mechanical efficiency. He rolled up the map, stuffing it into his backpack’s side pocket. As he zipped the main compartment, his fingers brushed against a stiff corner of paper that wasn’t his.
He froze.
Carefully, he pulled it out. It was a page, neatly torn from a sketchbook. It was the drawing of him from the garden. She must have slipped it into his bag at some point—in the trattoria, maybe, or during that last, desperate kiss. His own face, rendered in her swift, sure charcoal strokes, looked back at him. She’d written two words in small, precise letters in the bottom corner, not in English, but in Italian: Mi dispiace.
I’m sorry.
He sat on the edge of the bare mattress, the page in his hands. The embarrassment, the chill from the piazza, it all receded, replaced by a profound and aching loneliness. This wasn’t an ending. It was an amputations. She had taken a piece of the day and given it back to him, fossilized in charcoal and guilt.
He placed the drawing carefully between the pages of his paperback guidebook, a fragile, secret bookmark. He shouldered his pack, took a final look at the room with its blinking neon heartbeat, and closed the door.
On the platform, waiting for the train to Florence, he pulled out his phone. He opened a blank search screen. His thumbs hovered over the keys. British royal family. Youngest daughter. Duke of Kent. Amandine.
He could find out. The truth was probably three taps away. A name, a title, a photographed life of ribbon-cuttings and garden parties. He could give the ghost in the blue dress a shape, a biography, a prison of facts.
He stared at the blinking cursor. Then, slowly, he locked the screen and put the phone away. He wouldn’t do that to her. Or to the man in the drawing.
The train slid into the station with a hydraulic sigh. Doors clattered open. He boarded, found a window seat, and stowed his bag. As the train began to move, pulling him away from Rome, he watched the graffiti-streaked suburbs blur past. He didn’t look for her in every window, in every piazza that flashed by. The chase was over. All he had now was the weight of a missing piece, and the faint, smudged lines of a self he barely recognized, traveling with him into an uncertain future.