Chapter 11: Rain

I played it for her on the sidewalk, with the phone held between us under the restaurant's awning.

The writer listened to the whole thing with her head tilted and her eyes on the cobblestones.

When the vows came, in that flat little voice, her mouth tightened.

She didn't speak until the screen went dark.

"Thank you," she said.

"Are you going to write about it?"

"I'm going to write about the dinner I ate." She closed her notebook. "I'd planned three stars, and I've changed my mind about the service."

"That's all?"

"It's the only thing I've ever been able to prove." She slipped the notebook back in her bag. "I'm sorry about your mother."

She walked off toward the corner.

Luca had been standing a pace behind me the whole time, with his hands in his coat pockets.

"Three stars to what?" I asked him.

"It's a scale of five."

"Is two bad?"

"It's very bad, Willa."

I laughed, and the first drops of rain hit the awning above us.

Then the sky opened the way it does in Boston in November, all at once.

It came down in sheets, bouncing off the cobblestones, and the awning gave us a dry foot of sidewalk.

Luca took off his coat and put it over my shoulders.

It was heavy and warm, and it smelled like onions and woodsmoke and him.

I put my hands in the pockets because they were freezing.

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