Be Brave With Me

Chapter Twenty-Two

She had never known how much she adored lemons.

In her breakfast muffin when she was barely able to keep her eyes open at five in the morning. In an ice-cold glass of lemonade that Theo brought her after pool duty. Stuffed and baked with fresh tomatoes and oozing mozzarella, waiting for her warm in the oven after the guests had gone to bed. Up here in Ravello, removed from everything else, hidden in the sky, she'd discovered her love for them.

Among so many other things she had never known about herself.

Like, she had never known how much she loved to figure stuff out.

The pool drains kept getting clogged? She studied the content of the dip net she used to clean the pool with for a few days and convinced Romeo to cover the trees closest to the pool with some light-weight nets to catch most of the falling leaves before they could land in the clean water.

Guests standing lost in front of the Wall of Books more often than not? She asked for Nonna's permission and rearranged the books in a new system, taking care that the children's books stood at just the right height so that Jack and Katie could easily reach them.

Nonna's pantry was stocked to the brim with her home-made bottled lemonade, taking up way too much space? With Uncle Giuseppe's help, she talked the little shops all around Ravello into stocking Nonna's lemonade next to the generic stuff coming up from Amalfi. Soon, they had people stopping by for lunch at the hotel when the shops had run out of Nonna's bottles and the hotel was the only place left where her lemonade could be found.

She had never known how much she loved the freedom that came with the responsibility of having to do things all on her own. With no one around to plan her schedule for her, no one around to carry her stuff after her, no one around to tell her how to look or how to dress or what to post online. She had to take care of herself - because no one else would.

Which had led her to make a few adjustments.

Fed up with her mascara and curls dissolving in the heat of the day, she had banned her make-up pouch and curling iron to the back of her drawer.

Theoretically, she had always known one could do that. She had always known that there were more important things to life than the way you looked. But the way she looked had always happened to be the most important part of hers. Not anymore. At the Vista, Nonna or Romeo or Theo couldn't care less as long as she showed up ready to work. And it was freeing.

Most of all, freeing up her time. She saved twenty minutes every morning. Coming down into the kitchen with a bare face and her hair held back in two loose braids, she had stopped drawing Nonna's wrath by running late for breakfast prep. Freeing up so much space in her head, too. Out went all those names of shades of MAC lipstick Jess had her memorize once.

She had settled on a standard outfit of jeans shorts and whichever simple T-shirt she pulled out of their dresser that day. On some days, it belonged to her. On others, it was Theo's and she had to tie a knot into it at the small of her back to make it fit. All those flimsy silk tops and dry-cleaning-only dresses she had chucked into her bag without thinking? None of it would survive a tumble in Nonna's twenty-year-old washing machine, she had learned. And none of them felt as good on her skin as some soft washed-out cotton that smelled like Theo.

She saved even more time once she'd figured out she didn't have to pause and wait before answering a question. When someone had addressed her in the past, her first, engrained instinct had been to look for Jess or anyone else who surely knew the approved and revised answer for her. Not anymore. These days, she was all on her own. She was herself, free to speak up and voice her thoughts. Brave and brazen and beautiful.