Love & Gelato(73)

“You’re like twice as tall as me. And you have blond hair. We look nothing alike.”

“True.” He paused. “So now it’s my turn. How long have you known?”

“About a day.”

“How did you find out?”

I picked up the journal from the steps and handed it to him. “This.”

“Your journal?”

“No, it’s my mom’s. It’s the journal she kept when she was living here.”

“This is her journal? I noticed it looked similar, but I thought it was just a coincidence.” He turned it over in his hands.

“She wrote about everything that happened between her and Matteo. Only for most of it she just called him X, so at first I thought I was reading about you. But then you didn’t know about the secret bakery.”

“Wait a minute. The secret bakery? The place Ren asked me about?”

“Yeah. He was trying to surprise me by figuring out where it was.”

“So Ren knows about all this too?”

“Yes. He actually helped me track down Matteo.” I looked away. “We, ah, met him.”

He levitated like half a foot. “You met him?”

I kept my gaze on the ground. “Uh-huh.”

“Where?”

“Rome.”

He was looking at me like I’d just told him I was actually half-ostrich. “When did you go to Rome?”

“Yesterday—”

“Yesterday?”

“Yeah, we took the express train. First Ren picked me up. Then we went to FAAF and I called Francesca—”

“Francesca Bernardi? How did you even know about her?”

“The journal. She told me what Matteo’s last name was and we found him online and went to his art gallery and it was . . . well, a disaster.”

His mouth was literally hanging open. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

I shook my head. “Sorry. I’m not.”

He rubbed his hand across his chin. “Okay. So the two of you tracked down Matteo. Then what? Did he know who you were?”

“He made up this story about my mom being crazy and faking her journal. It was ridiculous. I mean, we look exactly alike and he just kept telling me that he’d never had a relationship with her. We ended up just booking it out of there.”

Howard blew the air out of his mouth. “Your mother would kill me. Here I thought you and Ren were just out eating gelato and going dancing, but you were tracking down your father in another city?”

“Yes. But I won’t do that again,” I said hastily. “It was kind of a one-time deal. Unless you’re hiding something else from me . . .”

“Nothing. All my cards are out.”

“Okay, good.”

“But where did you get the journal? Did you find it after your mom passed away?”

“No. Sonia gave it to me.”

“Sonia Sonia? My Sonia?”

“Yeah. My mom sent it in the mail last September and when it got to the cemetery Sonia was worried it was going to upset you, so she held off for a couple of days. But then you told her about the plan for me to come stay here and she thought my mom had sent it for me. But it wasn’t for me. It was for you.”

Howard held the book up carefully, like it was a bird he didn’t want to fly away.

“You should read it.”

“Mind if I start right now?”

“Please do.”

He slowly opened the cover, stopping at the sight of that first sentence. “Oh.”

“Yeah. I’ll leave you alone.”





Chapter 26




TWO HOURS LATER HOWARD CAME to my bedroom door, journal in hand. “I finished.”

“That was quick.”

“Want to go sit on the porch again?”

“Sure.”

I followed him downstairs and we settled ourselves on the porch swing. His eyes were kind of red.

“It was hard for me, reading all of that. I mean, she told me bits of it, but I didn’t know the whole story. There were so many misunderstandings. Missed connections.” He looked out over the cemetery. “She didn’t get everything right. For one thing, I never dated Adrienne.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. Matteo did.”

I looked at him blankly.

“Your mother wasn’t the only student Matteo was messing around with.”

“Ohhhh.” Another puzzle piece fell into place. “So is that why you told her the story of the bull and the baker? You were trying to tell her to look closer, because Matteo was two-timing her?”

He grimaced. “Yes, but I obviously wasn’t very successful. She had no idea what I meant by that story.”

“Yeah, that was pretty cryptic. Did you just make that story up?”

“No, it’s real. I think it’s pretty unlikely that it’s true, but it’s one of the legends that has been hanging around the city for centuries. I love stuff like that.” He shook his head. “Anyway, I knew that your mom was involved with Matteo. She kept it a secret because she was worried he’d get in trouble with the school, but he kept it a secret because he was a dirtbag. I knew he’d had at least a few affairs with students, and from what I’d seen of him, I knew he was bad news. I had my suspicions, and then one day I walked in on Adrienne and Matteo in the darkroom. That night when your mom saw us outside the club, I had been confronting her about it. I wanted her to tell your mother.”