Page 18 of Lost Dreams

“We love you!” Lorelei cooed. “Call us again soon.”

But over the next few months, Aurora dropped deeper into the world of Berlin art. She went to parties. She met fancy people who were willing to spend pretty pennies on paintings and sculptures. She presented her work, and she worked on a more individual basis with Sebastian, who’d taken an active interest in her development.

It didn’t occur to Aurora that she was in love with Sebastian until Christmastime. She was supposed to head back to Rome to celebrate with her family, whom she’d hardly spoken to since November, but there was a massive snowstorm over Berlin, and none of the trains left on time or at all. Because of this, she decided to stay in Berlin and work.

Sebastian called her to check in. There was a sweetness in his voice that wasn’t usually there, and Aurora spontaneously asked if he wanted to celebrate Christmas together. She knew he didn’t have any family nearby. His mother lived in Bavaria, and his father had left long ago.

Aurora bought a bottle of wine and several pastries and rang Sebastian’s doorbell on Christmas Eve. He flung open the door, his cheeks ruddy and his eyes alight. He no longer looked like the moody genius she knew from class. He just looked happy to see her.

That night, over wine, they listened to music and talked about their childhoods. They sat on the sofa and held hands and watched as the snow fell outside. When Sebastian first kissed her, Aurora didn’t hesitate. It felt as though their story had begun the moment she’d gotten to Berlin.

During spring semester, Aurora and Sebastian didn’t bother to hide their love from the other students. Because it was a more progressive school, and because Sebastian wasn’t so much older, not many people batted an eye. But when Sebastian recruited Aurora to show some of her paintings at his upcoming enormous gallery show, people began to pipe up with disdain. They thought Aurora was getting preferential treatment. The truth was, she was.

But Aurora didn’t care. She knew her stuff was good, and she knew Sebastian thought it was, too. Being in love with her didn’t make his eye any less discerning. During March and April, they worked tirelessly, often forgetting about the university entirely, and put together a gorgeous and thought-provoking show that was covered in multiple newspapers, including The Guardian and The New York Times.

During the closing party, which was held at the end of May—a full year after Aurora graduated from high school—Sebastian gave a speech, thanking Aurora for coming into his life and helping him broaden his work. Aurora wanted to make a speech, too, but she felt too shy, and she knew that most of her classmates now hated her and didn’t want to hear a thing from her.

Aurora’s parents wanted to come to the show, too, but they got held up with restaurant responsibilities. Aurora’s little sister, Nadia, who’d just graduated from high school herself, came to Berlin to celebrate, although she said that she didn’t get the art. “It’s weird.” Nadia shrugged.

The days immediately following the closure of the exhibition were some of the happiest of Aurora’s life. She was gearing up for a beautiful summer in Berlin, after which she would begin her second full year of art school. She was considering dropping out after that and maybe doing an artist residency in Japan or Mexico, somewhere she could broaden her craft without being held down to a specific place. When she mentioned this to Sebastian, he suggested that they go together, and she threw her arms around him.

She knew they were really in love.

What happened next was something Aurora would never have seen coming. She couldn’t have imagined it, not in a thousand years.

At the beginning of June, when Aurora was nineteen and Sebastian was twenty-seven, they were walking down a side road through Berlin, holding hands. Aurora went into a little shop to look at vintage dresses, while Sebastian stayed outside to take a call. In the span of those five minutes they were apart, something awful happened. Sebastian was struck by a car.

Aurora wasn’t allowed to ride in the ambulance with her beloved. She hired a car to take her to the hospital, and she sobbed all the way there in the back seat, trying to blot out the image of what she’d seen of Sebastian when she’d come out of the shop. Once in the waiting room, she paced back and forth, desperate for answers. Of course, because she wasn’t family, she had to wait until Sebastian’s mother came up from Bavaria and told her what was going on.

“He’s alive,” his mother told her, her words strangled. “But they’re saying that he will not walk again. Not soon.”

Aurora couldn’t believe this. She wanted to rewind the previous ten hours of her life and do them again. Last she’d checked, Sebastian was a strong and capable man of six-foot-four, and now, he was in and out of consciousness, and his legs would never work for him again.

Eventually, Aurora was allowed to go into the hospital room to see Sebastian. His eyes were wounded and hard, and he didn’t seem to want to look at her. When she talked about moving in with him to help him get around the apartment and readjust, he flatly told her that he’d thought about it, and that he wanted to go back to Bavaria with his mother.

“I’ll come with you,” Aurora said, a hiccup in her voice. She felt very young.

Sebastian shook his head. “I don’t want you to come. I don’t want you around.”

Aurora felt the words like several smacks across the face. She hurried back to the waiting room and then ran outside, where she sobbed uncontrollably. She knew that Sebastian couldn’t handle his feelings. She knew that he couldn’t see her and imagine the life they’d planned together. But she was fully willing to adjust her expectations, all because she loved him. Maybe she just needed to make him understand that?

But for three weeks, while Sebastian healed enough to go back to Bavaria, Sebastian alternated between refusing to see her and refusing to indulge her notion that they could stay together.

“I love you, Sebastian. You’re the most brilliant man I’ve ever known,” Aurora sobbed.

Eventually, when Aurora was too brokenhearted to do anything but lay in bed, she realized she needed help. The new semester would start in a few weeks, but she didn’t have the strength to go back. She didn’t have the strength to do anything. It all felt purposeless, now that she knew people like Sebastian could be destroyed so easily, as though they were bugs on a wall.

Lorelei answered the phone on the third ring. “Long time no talk, sweetie,” she said—using English for the first time in a while. Aurora couldn’t imagine she had anyway.

Aurora switched back to Italian immediately. She explained what had happened to her boyfriend, how he wanted to return to Bavaria so that his mother could help him, how she felt so broken that she didn’t know how to go back to university. Her mother did what any mother might have done. She went immediately to the airport and flew to Berlin to take Aurora home.

Over the next few weeks, Aurora lived in a state of shock. She moved through the house, feeling as though she were searching for something, yet unable to remember what she was looking for. She ate only when her parents reminded her to. When Nadia went to university—at the prestigious Università di Firenze—Aurora hugged her sister goodbye and had to reckon with the fact that now, it would be just Aurora and her parents, here in the house.

How had this happened to her? She was supposed to be their most successful child.

It was Roberto’s idea that she enroll in a few business classes at the Rome Business School, a boring if apt name. Aurora shrugged and said, “All right,” thinking she could help out with his restaurants for the time being. Roberto’s head was there, too.

“I really need your genius mind,” he told her as they walked together to her first business class. It was autumn, but Rome was sweltering. “Business is a game I’ve never really been able to fight my way through. I always felt safe in the kitchen, and now...”