The Winter Project

40. Cleo

Nic was textbook romantic. He sent roses to his apartment when Cleo was at home and he was at work so that she would receive them before he made it home. He came home from work with bottles of wine and chocolates and offered Cleo massages even though he was the one who had been at work all day while she explored the city or waited patiently at home for him to return. He never got upset when she said she wasn't in the mood for sex.

The problem, she found, with being with Nic instead of someone like Isabel was that he was much quicker to offend. Any comment or joke about another man had him asking questions in a way that he thought was subtle but was in reality just irritating. Any time Cleo got too drunk and angrily declared that she felt suicidal, Nic got concerned and tried to take her to a hospital. Maybe it was a sign of bad friendship that Isabel had always just ignored it, or maybe it was the right thing to do because the amount of concern that Nic displayed made Cleo uncomfortable. She did not like being constantly handed everything to her on a plate, and she missed the excitement and everyday change of life in the van.

She did not miss Isabel, who had betrayed her and stolen her van. To her, Isabel was dead.

As she walked through the streets of Milan, her fingers loosely entwined with Nic's, she felt smug as she thought of how Isabel was so scared of a city that was nothing short of beautiful. The well-dressed people walking with purpose, the large parks filled with children and students playing and relaxing, the extravagant number of shops that she could not afford to shop in. Cleo loved that she had beaten Isabel at something, and she loved that she had tuned her out so much that she was not sad or upset at being abandoned. As long as Nic promised himself to her forever, she did not care about anybody else.

Nic had promised to take Cleo to the Duomo di Milano, and although the weather was at a level of heat that most people would find intolerable, Cleo was excited to look at a building full of history with outstanding architecture and a romantic aurora about it that would get Nic thinking about lifelong marital commitment. She was full of energy, jumping around and asking Nic to buy her gelato and swimming costumes and sunglasses. She wasn't one hundred percent sure what he did for a living, but she knew that he had a nicely decorated apartment and a car with a new-car scent. He had originally told her that he owned a restaurant outside of the city, but her image of him cooking in a kitchen had been replaced with the reality of a businessman always immaculately dressed in expensive suits and engaged in heated phone calls. She wondered how she had managed to spend several months with him and not work out exactly what it was that he did for work, but she knew he had tried to explain it to her several times and she had simply not been interested. In some capacity, it involved a chain of restaurants.

As they turned a corner and the Duomo came into sight, Cleo was dumbfounded. It was so much bigger than she could have possibly imagined, and she was only looking at it from the side. She leapt and bound and dragged Nic behind her as she excitedly ran to see it in all it's glory from the front. It was a busy Sunday afternoon, and Nic assured her that the queues to go inside would be long, and he was right. He promised to take her back another day and show her the beauty that was within, promising it would be even more astounding than it's exterior.

She walked around in awe, admiring the details of the concrete and the windows. She wanted to touch it, and so she bounded towards the nearest available wall and ran her fingers along the brickwork. Cleo loved old religious buildings. They gave her a sense of security. She was a regular churchgoer as a child as she was raised Catholic and attended Catholic schools. It reminded her of happier times in her childhood, when she couldn't remember her parents fighting, her father screaming at her mother and the sounds of his fist going into the walls.

She saw several people gathered around a plaque and forced her way to the front, wondering what interesting piece of history she would learn.

In memory of the thirteen people who lost their lives on July 26th, 1996.

She felt sick. It hit her instantly and without warning. She felt sick with every bad emotion ever experienced in her entire life. Guilt, depression, suicidal thoughts, hurt, pain, empathy, grief.

It was a real event. She had known that all along but to see it here, in the exact spot where it took place, was too much for her. She had put aside the feelings and wellbeing of one of her closest friends for the sake of Nic, of finding love, of being selfish. She looked around and all of a sudden, she could see the story that Isabel had only told her once, a few months after they first met. How she lay down on the ground beside the wall of the Duomo. How the Polizia took her away from the Square. How the people hid behind the statue in front of the Duomo and screamed for their lives.

It was as if a video of Isabel's memory was playing inside Cleo's head, and she couldn't turn it off. For the first time in her life, she was unable to shut somebody out and feel nothing for them.

She had been wrong to ever try and force somebody to relive this, for it was too much for her to take and she had never even lived it. She wondered where Isabel was, and she was all of a sudden sick with worry.

She spent that night desperately trying to contact Isabel, but she did not respond to any of Cleo's calls or texts and her absence on social media did not make things any easier. Having run out of options, Cleo asked Nic to report the van as stolen to the Polizia. They told him that it had been several months since the crime had happened, but that they would list the license plate as stolen and recover it if it was found. All she could do now was wait.