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“What are you waiting for? Pour.Per favore.” Farah holds out a plastic cup. She wears a Scottish plaid wool skirt with a red leather bomber jacket. Her hair is a loose ponytail cascading out of the back of a black baseball cap. Farah has joined our Italian friend group. My little community is growing. I close out of Instagram. I want to stay in the moment in my new life.

Conor takes theseat next to me. The train has rocked Gaetano and Farah to sleep.

“I heard from my accounts in Jersey. A couple of guys that work with Googs reached out to me. They’re concerned. Googs is looking for money to retain an attorney. The feds picked him up in Brielle.”

“No way. They’ll be coming for me next,” I say quietly.

“If they had something on you, they would’ve never let you leave the country.”

“I gave them everything I had,” I tell him.

Unresolved business issues are like problems in a marriage; the longer you ignore them, the worse it is when you go to solve them. And sometimes, you never do. Conor leans back in his seat and closes his eyes. Instead of sleeping, I write. I remember Bobby’s and my final meeting at Thompson, Thompson & Thompson.

I poured myselfa glass of ice water from the pitcher placed on a silver tray in the center of the conference table at my divorce lawyer’s office in Spring Lake. I saw Bobby through the glass partition and waved to him.

“Hey, Jess.” He kissed me on the cheek before he sat down.

I poured him a glass of water and placed it in front of him.

“We’re really doing this?” Bobby sipped the water. He looked sad, which hurt me. Bobby Bilancia had never done bleak and now he was living it.

I had to stay strong, so I nodded in the affirmative. This way, I wouldn’t cry.

“This is crazy. I still love you. We’ll buy a house. I know you hate that shower. We’ll move. I’ll get you a tub as big as Lake Como. Whatever you want.”

I sat next to Bobby and took his hand. “It’s not about ahouse. Or a bathtub. I don’t think I’d be happy anywhere. Not yet anyway.”

“What was wrong with us? We’re just getting started. There are always problems, but we work them out. Okay, we had a setback—”

“It was not a setback, Bobby; it was asign.”

“I wish you wouldn’t look at our life together as though we were doomed by somestregaon the boardwalk.” Bobby sat back in the chair and folded his arms across his chest.

“It’s not your responsibility to make me happy.”

“Now, there we disagree. As a husband, that’s my job. To seek happiness for my wife is part of why I got married in the first place.”

“And what if you can’t make me happy?”

Bobby turned away from me, which in all of our time together, he had never done. “Then we do this,” he said.

Piazza Del Campo

The city of Siena sits peacefully on a Tuscan peak covered with flimsy clouds that float over the rooftops like a veil of sheer organza. Siena is an amber fort constructed of medieval brick from the twelfth century. As we enter the piazza, the charcoal sky overhead breaks open, allowing a cylinder of coral light to fall upon the town, illuminating the operatic, fan-shaped piazza, which resembles a stage after the curtain rises. This is the Italy of Shakespeare, of medieval pageants and parades, with displays of colorful coats of arms, bold flags, folk music, and dancing in the streets.

As we disembark from the train, we’re greeted by our guide, Raphael, atrifolau, a local truffle hunter, accompanied by his energetic beagle, named Forza. Raphael, from San Miniato, is a robust Italian, small, sturdy, and quick, with a bottle-brush mustache and lively eyes. We load into a truck with them to drive up into the hills above Siena. I am going to forget Googs, the FBI, and my troubles to focus on the truffle hunt.

“The important thing to remember,” Conor says, “is how good the truffles taste once we find them.” The truck sways back and forth on the dirt road as we climb to the spot where the truffles grow. “Any suffering will be worth it!”

“Keep telling us that, Conor,” Farah says.

Raphael follows Forza, and we follow them along a narrow path deep into the forest. The men leap over a small creek; Farah and I take our time walking over the stones to the other side.

We’ve been climbing for about half a mile when Forza begins to bark. She circles a tree a few feet from the path. Raphael asks us to stand back. Soon, Forza scratches at the base of the tree, kicking up sticks and leaves with her paws, until she clears a spot, revealing the bare, black earth underneath. Like a grave digger, she goes deeper, making a wall around the center. Raphael kneels and roots around the hole. He pulls a spade out of his pocket and gently glides it along the walls of the hole that Forza dug. Soon, he pulls out a black bulb with stringy white veins. “Brava, Forza!”

Raphael holds the truffle up for us to see. “Tartufo! Splendida!” he says before placing it in the cloth sack tied around his waist. “D’oro.I was here a month ago. No truffles. We came on the best day! Who wants to dig?”

“I will,” I volunteer, pulling on my work gloves. I kneel next to Raphael. Forza barks.