That's Amore

Chapter 41

The villa, once a haven, felt too loud in its stillness.

Every creak in the wood, every sigh of the wind through the shutters, every footstep on tile—Isabella heard it all as if the house itself was holding its breath.

She stood in her room just after dawn, the sky the color of wet violets. Her suitcase lay open on the bed like an accusation. The cotton of her blouse trembled in her fingers. Outside, the vineyard was bathed in mist, rows of vines standing like sentinels, unaware.

She hadn’t told anyone—not Chiara, not Ginevra, not even Biscotto, who now sat by the door watching her with tilted ears and soft, unblinking eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to him, her throat tight. “I just… I can’t stay if he doesn’t ask me to.”

The words hung there, tragic and true.

She folded her life in slow, aching motions.

The sketchbook, the lavender scarf Giuliano had wrapped around her shoulders one night beneath the stars, the pressed wildflower she’d saved from their walk near the old mill—it all went into her bag, along with a piece of her that still believed in forever.

She paused over her art supplies.

Would it hurt more to take them, or to leave them behind?

In the end, she slipped her brushes into the side pocket, as if some part of her still hoped Tuscany hadn’t seen the last of her.

By the time the sun had fully risen, she was slipping through the hallway like a ghost. The house was quiet, the kind of quiet that follows a storm.

She left a note on the kitchen table, tucked beneath a jar of wildflower honey.

> Giuliano,

I don’t know how to stay when I feel like I’ve already been let go.
I’m sorry for not saying this to your face.
But I loved you more than I knew how to explain.

And maybe that’s where I failed.

Isabella

Her fingers trembled as she pressed it flat.

Then she kissed Biscotto between the ears and slipped out the door, into the waking world.

The drive to the train station was a blur—olive groves and crumbling stone walls passing like memories she wasn’t ready to lose. Her taxi driver spoke gently, but she couldn’t find her voice to respond.

When the train pulled in, her heart stuttered. She hesitated on the platform, looking over her shoulder one last time.

No one was there.

And somehow, that made her decision feel final.

She boarded with the weight of a hundred what-ifs pressing on her spine.

As the countryside unfurled past her window, she pressed her fingers to the glass and imagined the roads back to the vineyard—wondering if Giuliano had read the note, if he had tried to follow her, if he even knew she was gone.

Maybe he didn’t.

Maybe he thought she’d just gone for a walk, like all the other mornings, barefoot through the fields with the sun in her hair.

Or maybe… maybe he’d let her go.

And that, above all, broke her.

By the time the train reached Rome, Isabella felt hollowed out—like a peach pit, all the sweetness left behind in some sunlit grove she would never see again.

The city swelled around her in the way cities do—indifferent, loud, crowded.

She checked into a quiet hotel near the Spanish Steps. It was elegant, with soft linens and little soaps that smelled like citrus, but nothing about it felt like home.

She curled up that night beneath unfamiliar sheets and tried not to think of Giuliano’s voice. Of his hand at the small of her back. Of how it had felt to be wanted.

Not just in passing.

But forever.