Julia shouldering her laden market basket walks toward the piazza. 11:30. Chris due in today from the Tuscan tour. They had marvelous events in San Rocco, and even worked in a country lunch at Enrico’s, a hit, and quite different from anything else they experienced. Then they were off to Montalcino and the Maremma. Julia checked and rechecked all the details. All Chris had to do was have fun and keep everyone happy. He’s coming from Florence, after dropping them at the hotel. They fly out tomorrow, and it’s all over until fall. He’s arranged their dinner tonight at a totally overlooked trattoria on via Parione where the chef will be making filet mignon in a reduced and rich sauce of shallots and balsamic vinegar. They are going to love it. After, they take an easy stroll back to the hotel Kit and Colin love. And then Julia has Chris back.

She stops to say hello to signora Bevilacqua in the bookstore, stops at Armando’s cheese shop to pick up a wedge of Sardinian pecorino. The sandals she bought in Capri rub on her right foot, and she leans to loosen the strap. As she stands up she catches sight of a man and woman at an outside table at Violetta’s bar. Her throat catches and she begins to cough. She straightens up and looks again. This sandal is irritating her instep. She runs her fingers through her hair, shakes it out, and looks again at the apparition of Wade and Lizzie drinking coffee in the piazza. She closes her eyes, looks hard, then turns down a shadowed vicolo of tiny shops. Her back pressed against the stone wall, she tries to will her mind to focus. Five minutes. Inhale. Exhale.

Julia, back in sunlight. Walking fast toward the piazza. Mirage, mistaken identity, Swedes on vacation, hallucination. No, Wade. Lizzie. Like anyone else. Taking in the morning. The girl, Lizzie, scoots back her chair and reaches into her bag for sunglasses. Now they see her, Wade rising, almost tipping the table. But Julia’s eyes are on Lizzie looking up quizzically. Lizzie as herself. Julia rushes to her and almost falls forward as Lizzie rises, smiling, and Wade leans in to hug her, too. Julia tries, can’t speak, but sits down gaping at her unrecognizable daughter. Lizzie without two layers of gray circles under her eyes, with shining, not lank and dirty hair. Lipstick. Her small teeth and winged eyebrows. Lizzie herself. “Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie,” she says. “Am I in a dream?”

“Mama, it’s good to see you. Not a dream. Not a miracle. A lot of effort. I’m doing well. Finally.”

“Wade? You went?”

“We’ll tell you the whole story. I thought it would be best just to show up, cut all the distance out of the picture.”

“I’m stunned. Look at you both.” My loves, she didn’t say. Wade swims before her more godlike than ever, his fair hair streaked with white, his elegant, strong body more fit than ever. Something agrees with him.

“You look radiant.” His smile, wider on one side than the other. “You know it, too, Hadley girl.” When they were young he’d always been amused that she was known as “the Hadley girl.”

Violetta comes over, a questioning look on her face. But Julia just says, “Meet Wade and Lizzie,” with no explanation. She orders an espresso for herself and they want more cappuccino.

“Wow, you’re speaking Italian!” Lizzie is looking at her; they’re all gazing as though they’ve encountered each other underwater in diving gear.

“Well.” Still blank. “How did this, when did you…” She trails off.

“We got into Rome yesterday and drove up this morning. We’re staying right down the street.” He points toward the Albergo Lorenzo. “We can’t check in until two. We were going to ask around for Villa Assunta. I got the name from some of your lawyer’s correspondence. That’s all I had, no address, only San Rocco.”

“Um.” Julia was not going to justify her attempt to cut him off from her life. What does he expect? “Oh, Lizzie. You’re here. You’re here. I can’t take this in.”

“Hope it’s not a bad shock. It’s a shock to me, too. I’m trying to trust it. Where to begin?” Lizzie says. “I’ve been in a residential treatment house for a year. I’m sorry I didn’t let you know. I just could not. I had to isolate myself from everything. I know you thought when I hit bottom, where I’m supposed to pull out of my habit or else, that I didn’t. I fell right back. Even worse. Letting everyone down once again. In the hospital, the doctor thought I was sleeping but I heard him say to you that if I didn’t kick it then, statistically I’d die before I was forty. That wasn’t bad news to me at the time, since that’s what I wanted anyway. But later, after I bailed on you in Savannah, when I got back to San Francisco and fell in with my group, I felt sick a lot. I was on some new opiate that was out on the street. I saw in the mirror that I’d developed this weird tic of fluttering my eyes. I looked crazy. I was in that nice yellow robe you gave me, all stained. My reflection was someone I hardly recognized and wouldn’t want to know. In some way, that robe did it. When you brought it to the hospital, it was soft chenille, that hopeful yellow, and I knew you’d wanted something to comfort me when I took comfort from no one. I looked down at it. All nasty.

“Skipping a bit. Enter a social worker. She came to the house and told us about a new city program we could apply for. Out of pure boredom, maybe out of not recognizing myself anymore, I applied. At the time, I wasn’t planning on quitting. Maybe finding a nicer place to stay, taking better care of myself. My fingernails were always bleeding. Everything wrecked. I still wanted to get high, only it didn’t feel high at all anymore. And hadn’t in a long time.”

Violetta sets down the coffees, eyebrows raised quizzically. Obviously, something intense is happening. She brings, too, a plate of biscotti.

“First thing, hard and horrible thing was detox. I was rolled out of an ambulance and checked into a locked facility where I went through that once again. You well know what the process is. This time I just endured it and walked through the sessions. Maybe something was at work but I was strung out for so long that I think my synapses were all numb. Long story short, I walked out of that shithole, as I have before, exhausted mentally, with no clear thought that the detox would take. I was put in a taxi and sent straight to this new place for rehab.

“So then I find myself in a program with twenty other druggies—all women—at a huge Victorian in the Haight. Four to a room. Selma Hodges, in charge. She has her own theories. We made fun, laughed at her. Everyone had to work in the house. It was immaculate. White curtains in every room, starched. Quilts made by ‘the girls.’ We had kitchen shifts and had to learn to cook. We had eggs at breakfast. Cereal. No caffeine. She had us making soups and stews, muffins. Twenty mentally stunted women buttering muffins.” She laughs and shakes her head. Julia feels breathless. Lizzie uttering something amusing!

“She required us to choose an activity and to spend three hours a day working on it. The basement was set up as a weaving and sewing room, a potting studio in the rear, a computer room upstairs. I chose potting. And I loved it. We had to commit to one online course. I signed up for, don’t laugh, international relations. I guess something way outside my little realm was appealing. We had to volunteer at Golden Gate Park one morning a week, weeding and picking up trash like prisoners. Later we worked in nursing home kitchens, school lunchrooms, in libraries shelving books, and then graduated to part-time jobs. Mine was making hot fudge sundaes at the chocolate factory on the wharf. I never want another bite of chocolate in my life. But, Mom, I’m good at pottery. Bowls anyway. My plates are wonky and the cups’ handles always break. But I’m selling a few small bowls at Selma’s friends’ shop.”

“How about a rock of a cookie instead?” Wade passes the plate of almond biscotti. They are tooth-cracking hard.

Lizzie continues. “At night, we had the usual sessions. I’ve always looked down on those as dumb-ass and reductive. Drama queens starring in their pitiful plays. My name is so-and-so and I’m a royal screw-up and you’re a royal screw-up but in a different screwy way. Selma Hodges, though, had a touch. Maybe she was hokey but she probed, she listened, and she has a sense of humor, something I hadn’t experienced with any of the many fuckers who tried to save me from myself by telling me to make lists of my goals. She also has a shit detector and sometimes just cut people off with a Rethink that remark. I can’t explain everything. Against all odds, I started to feel comfortable. The old saw, One day at a time. But months have passed. This is condensed. Upshot—I have been off drugs for eleven months and I have every intention of remaining clean, clean, clean.”

Julia, guarded, feels that guard start dissolving. Almost a year. A long time. Lizzie—articulate, if foul-mouthed. Looking normal. Dear and remembered. The sweet curve of her jaw, sweet oval face, sweet smile. The girl who used to decorate her sand castle with shells and wanted to find fairies under mushrooms. She’s clear and present, the ironic smirk gone.

Wade reaches over and puts his hand over Julia’s. “I know you’re hit with a stun gun; I was dumbfounded. I went to the house where your friend Chris went and Lizzie’s friend maintained that Lizzie was ‘lost in space.’ A damaged guy with a tattooed face knew where she was because a girlfriend of his checked into the same place and dropped out after a month. Said it was too artsy-craftsy for her. Too politically correct. Too-too.”

“That’s Sandy. He doesn’t look like a Sandy anymore but he must have been one a long time ago.” Lizzie pushes up her sunglasses, now that the shadow has reached their table, and Julia gets to see her eyes, the same pond green as Wade’s.

“Anyway, let’s move on to lunch and we can finish the saga. There’s too much to say. I just didn’t want to call and drop this on you. Wasn’t sure you’d believe me. Where can we go?” Wade tosses money on the table, more than enough, a habit Julia used to admire.

Julia stepped to the edge of the piazza and left Susan a message. “You will not believe this. I’ll tell you everything later. Sit down if you’re standing. I’m with Wade and Lizzie. In the piazza. Shock. Lizzie is totally okay. It’s like someone stood up out of the grave. We’re going to lunch. Lunch! Just letting you know. Lunch. Like ordinary people.” She texted Chris: Call you later. Her throat felt parched. She drained the bottle of water in her bag. Lunch. Crazy.

She chose Angelo’s trattoria, where she’s only been a few times. If she went to her usual Stefano’s, she’d have to introduce everyone and she’s not ready to do that yet, though she knows all of San Rocco soon will be talking about the appearance of the ex-husband and the daughter no one has heard of before.

Angelo, the owner, confusing her with Camille, congratulates her on the art show. They’re seated in the courtyard under a white umbrella. The pallid light beneath makes them all look spectral. Lizzie looks directly at Julia. “I haven’t given you a moment to tell me what you are doing here. I don’t even know quite how you got to Tuscany or who your friends are.” Lizzie takes the menu and regards it with interest. Julia hasn’t seen her eat a bite in years, and this is the first time in memory that Lizzie has expressed a particle of interest in her. An ugly aspect of addiction: me, me, me. Angelo plops down a carafe of wine, not ordered but welcome. Lizzie asks for water.

“Your dad probably has told you that I left Savannah. When I was house-sitting for my professor in Chapel Hill, I met two women. We had such rapport—fun, really—and we had some common issues. We’d all lost our husbands. Not that mine was dead! Sorry, Wade. We cooked together, spent a lot of time walking on the beach. It was exhilarating to make great friends. We brought out the visionary in each other. Over the summer, we got a wild idea and here we are.” How much does Lizzie know about Wade’s escapades and his forthcoming daddy status? Skip for now. Well, no. Not at this stage. “Things at home were complicated by your father’s romance with another woman.” He fucked up everything, she didn’t say, but bit the inside of her jaw and tasted blood.

Glad the waiter speaks no English.

Wade looks up, seemingly unperturbed. “She knows about Rose. We don’t need to get that far right now.”

Julia feels a sweep of anger—who is he to decide?—but she takes a sip of wine. “Okay. Va bene. Onward,” she says, just a slight edge to her voice. “You all come out to the house for dinner, see the villa. Susan has made the garden a showplace. Camille has her art studio. We have the most beautiful kitchen with marble tables and a huge sink and copper pots everywhere. I’m taking my Mulberry experience to another level. I’m trying, no, I am actually writing a book called Learning Italian. I’m combining my study of the language with Italian cooking, real Italian cooking. I took a course where we each had a pig to dress and cook.” Openmouthed, Wade looks at her.

“That’s fabulous, Mom. You’re loving it, I can tell. In a funny way, it sounds like Hopesprings House. That’s where I am.”

They share a laugh. The first one in a dozen years. “Cool name. I hope it does! I am happy every day here. We’re traveling a lot. The other thing is, I also have a job. Helping plan wine and culture tours for a California vineyard owner, Chris Burns. He’s just finishing our second tour of the year. I do research and handle details and help plan. Love it! And Chris and I have become close over the past few months.” Let it all out.

Lizzie nods, scarfing up the pasta and reaching for bread. Whether she knows how destructive her addiction has been for her parents, Julia has no idea. What a wake of flotsam and jetsam she left behind.

“Back to you, Lizzie. What I’m doing is not as monumental as your big changes.”

They’re eating. As a family. Watching this good Lizzie-twin, Julia is barely able to swallow. Had she totally given up? She thinks she had. The story of the yellow robe undoes her; cry later.

Angelo brings over platters of grilled meats and potatoes. “What do they do to make such simple food so good?” Wade asks, stabbing a second sausage. His dazzling smile, as though nothing ever went wrong. She’s not immune to his beauty, even as he bites into a hunk of sausage. Pretty herself, she’s always privately acknowledged his prerogative. He wears it lightly, almost unaware, but the first time she saw him she thought of a line from a poem she just studied in school. He walks in beauty like the night. The poet said she, but the line applied. How many everyday mornings has he walked into the kitchen, tousled from sleep, and in the middle of frying pancakes, she’s caught her breath. He didn’t fight for me, she thinks. He took the course of least resistance, like lightning. But here she is, Lizzie, my girl.

“It’s the water and the sun.” She smiles. “Be right back.” In the bathroom, she turns on the water full blast and cries. Not for the last time.

If they notice her flush and red nose, they don’t say. “You can check in now. Why don’t I come back in a couple of hours and pick you up. Walk down that street”—she points—“and I’ll meet you at the gate at four. We can take a walk and talk more, then I’ll make dinner.” She gathers up her packages and rushes out the door; she practically runs home. The confusion she’s escaped during these months of walking on air crowds her body. Lizzie: possible again. Wade: former body and soul love, now impossible. She feels as if she’s about to go under anesthesia.

At home, she lies down in the grass under the pear tree and falls deeply asleep.