Page 113 of A Wedding in Tuscany

‘No, no, you haven’t. No more than me, anyway.’

‘We need to be way better at communicating.’

‘Way better,’ I agree. I exhale, long and slow, more controlled this time.

‘Did you really think that that’s what I was saying? The breaking up thing?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know. Yes. I guess.’

‘Can we rewind, do you think?’

‘Rewind. What do you mean?’

‘To before we had this stupid fight.’

‘Okay,’ I say, unsure where he’s going.

‘Sarah, I’ve noticed that you have had something on your mind for the past few months. Is it about me or our relationship?’

‘No,’ I say shaking my head earnestly. ‘I think it’s about Africa.’

He blinks at me. ‘Wow, really? Africa?’ I nod. ‘That’s like … possibly the last thing I imagined you saying.’

‘I should explain.’

‘That would be good,’ he says with smiling eyes, the corners of his mouth upturned slightly.

‘Well, you remember when you told me about this trip?at Lins and Nick’s?’ I ask rhetorically.

‘Yes,’ he replies anyway and I shake my head at him.

‘Well, it was weird that day hearing the number forty and connecting it with me.’

‘Yeah, you seemed a little …’

‘Freaked out. I was freaked out.’

‘Was it the number itself or just hitting the milestone?’ he asks.

‘Well, I thought at first it was the number?and at times, it has been about that. I mean, forty is halfway to eighty and?’

‘But you’re gonna live way past ninety, that’s for sure,’ he interjects.

‘Well, we don’t know that?no one knows know how long they have, but that’s a whole other thing and can I please just make my point?’ I widen my eyes so he knows I’m only half-serious.

‘Please continue. No doubt, sometime in the next hour, we’ll get to your point.’

I respond to his teasing with a dramatic sigh, then continue. ‘So, yes, sometimes it was about the number?and of course, Cat goes and gives me Grandma’s pearls so that didn’t help and … never mind,’ I say, cutting myself off. I do not need to revisit the ‘I’m old’ tangent. ‘Anyway, so the day after you told me about Italy, I went looking for this letter I wrote to myself when I was around nineteen or twenty?’

‘Hey, I wrote one of those,’ he says.

‘Really?’

‘Yeah,’ he laughs, ‘don’t sound so surprised. It was for a class in college.’

‘Mine was for a class too.’

‘You know what mine said, at the end?’ he asks. ‘Live a big life.’