“Elena’s people.”
“Esattamente. That way they didn’t have to mix with us commoners. Cosimo Medici was the one who kicked out all the butchers. He wanted the bridge to be more prestigious.” He looked at me. “So what was that book you were reading? The one you had under your bed.”
You trust him. The words elbowed their way into my head before I even had a chance to wonder. So what if I’d known Ren for only two days? I did trust him.
I took the journal out of my purse. “This is my mom’s journal. She was living in Florence when she got pregnant with me and it’s all about her time in Italy. She sent it to the cemetery before she died.”
He glanced at the book, then back up at me. “No way. That’s pretty heavy.”
Heavy. That was exactly it. I opened to the front cover, looking again at those ominous words. “I started reading it the day after I got here. I’m trying to figure out what happened between Howard and my mom.”
“What do you mean?”
I hesitated. Was it possible to condense the whole messy story into a couple of sentences? “My mom met Howard when she was here going to school, and then when she got pregnant, she left Italy and never told him about me.”
“Seriously?”
“Once she got sick she started talking about him a lot, and then she made me promise I’d come live here with him for a while. She just never actually told me what went wrong between them, and I think she left me the journal so I could figure it out.”
I turned and met Ren’s stare. “So last night when you said you don’t know Howard very well, it was like a huge understatement.”
“Yeah. I’ve officially known him for . . .” I counted on my fingers. “Four days.”
“No way.” He shook his head incredulously, sending his hair flying. “So let me get this straight. You’re an American, living in Florence—no, living in a cemetery—with a father you just found out about? You’re even stranger than I am.”
“Hey!”
He bumped his shoulder against mine. “No, I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant we’re both kind of different.”
“What makes you different?”
“I’m sort of American, sort of Italian. When I’m in Italy I feel too American, and when I’m in the States I feel too Italian. Also, I’m older than everyone in my grade.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen. My family lived in Texas for a couple of years when I was really young, and when we moved back I didn’t speak Italian very well. I was already kind of old for my grade, and they had to hold me back a year so I could catch up. My parents ended up enrolling me at the American school a few years later, but the school wouldn’t allow me to skip forward to the grade I’m supposed to be in.”
“When will you be eighteen?”
“March.” He looked at me. “So you’re really only staying for the summer?”
“Yeah. Howard and my grandma want me to stay longer, but the circumstances are obviously pretty weird. I barely know him.”
“But maybe you’ll get to know him. Chainsaw aside, I kind of like him.”
I shrugged. “It just seems so bizarre. If my mom hadn’t gotten sick, I probably still wouldn’t know anything about him. She’d always just told me that she’d gotten pregnant young and decided it was best to keep my father out of the picture.”
“Until now.”
“Until now,” I echoed.
“Where will you live when you leave Florence?”
“Hopefully with my friend Addie. I stayed with them for the rest of sophomore year, and she’s going to ask her parents if I can stay with them next year too.”
He looked at the journal. “So what have you been reading about in there?”
“Well, so far I know that they had to keep their relationship a secret. He was an assistant teacher at the school she was going to, and I guess the school wouldn’t have liked it. And she was hard-core about keeping it a secret. Like after they started dating, she stopped writing his name because was afraid someone would read her journal and find out about them. She just calls him ‘X.’?”
He shook his head. “Scandalous. Well, that’s probably your answer right there. Seems like most secret romances have a shelf life.”
“Maybe. But when I first got here Sonia told me that my mom lived with Howard at the cemetery for a while, so that’s not exactly secretive. And she said that one day my mom just left. She didn’t even say good-bye to Sonia.”
“Wow. Something must have happened. Something big.”
“Like . . . my mom got pregnant?”
“Oh. I guess that would be a big deal.” He chewed on his lower lip thoughtfully. “Now you have me curious. Keep me in the loop, would you?”
“Sure.”
“So she loved Ponte Vecchio. What other places did she write about?”