Page 9 of Lost Dreams

“Oh, dear me,” Raffaello said, sounding exhausted. “I see what’s happening. Go on, Roberto. Ask her if she’d like to go dancing with you, or whatever it is you young people do these days. But please, I beg you, have her home at a decent hour. Every day, she must practice eight to ten hours. She must compete with the crème de la crème.”

At first, Lorelei thought Roberto would say that he wasn’t planning on asking her. Maybe Raffaello had already scared him away. But Roberto seemed unafraid of Raffaello’s whole performance. He tilted his head and said quietly to Lorelei, as Raffaello put on his leather coat, “What do you say? I know a wonderful place to dance.”

In the years that followed, Lorelei would call this the best night of her life.

Roberto went back to the kitchen, leaving Lorelei bubbly and excited. She sipped more of her wine and said goodbye to the people she’d dined with, grateful to see the back of the Sydney Opera House owner’s head. Then, just as she’d convinced herself that Roberto had forgotten about her, he returned wearing all black, his energy electric.

“Those people,” he said, shaking his head. “How do you stand them?”

Lorelei laughed. “They’ve given me my life,” she said.

“I think you should take it back from them,” he said.

Roberto and Lorelei stepped into the frigid night. It was December, and a light snow was falling. This was a rarity for Rome, but not for Nantucket, and Lorelei felt launched into the past, into her childhood. She remembered making snowmen with Allegra and Alexander. She remembered throwing snowballs against the White Oak Lodge and watching them explode.

“Are you all right, Lorelei?” Roberto asked.

“Of course,” Lorelei lied. “I’m always all right.”

And for the course of the night, Lorelei truly was.

For hours, they danced. Lorelei felt her body pulsing next to Roberto’s. She watched the flicker of his muscles in the light and the sweep of his hair as he brushed it from his face.

The truth was, she hadn’t dated anyone seriously since Nantucket Island. Her high school boyfriend Carter Johnson—a name that seemed taken from an American sitcom—was now deeply entrenched in her past, so much so that the tragic story of their love seemed to belong to someone else.

Could she start over with Roberto? Did she even have time, given her intense schedule?

The better question was whether he even had time, given his intense schedule.

But all of a sudden, they were kissing. Lorelei’s eyes were closed. She felt drawn into his warm embrace, his thick arms, his pillow-like lips.

They kissed for ages, so long that eventually, the club closed, and Roberto and Lorelei found themselves leaning against the antique wall outside. Around them, Rome was black with night, and everyone had hurried inside to protect themselves from the cold. All Lorelei and Roberto needed were one another.

Eventually, they found a little bar for a nightcap, one where only three other people sat alone, watching the snow. Lorelei and Roberto couldn’t stop laughing and talking. They couldn’t get enough of each other, nor of telling one another their plans for the future. They were both endlessly driven and creative.

“I want to own restaurants all over the world,” Roberto said, spreading his fingers out. “I don’t just want to be the chef. I want to call all the shots. I want to plan every menu.”

“First Rome?” she asked.

“And then maybe Sicily,” he said. “I have family down there, and I’ve always loved it.”

“What about Sardinia?” Lorelei asked. She’d recently played a show in Cagliari and been fascinated by its beauty.

“If you say Sardinia, we’ll make Sardinia happen as well,” Roberto said, kissing the tip of her nose.

After that, Lorelei explained her plans, too. She told him about wanting to play at every performance hall, from Carnegie to the Royal Albert Hall to the Elbphilharmonie. She watched their future, glowing in his dark eyes. She wondered, too, if in the midst of all this chaotic success they’d actually find a way to grow together. She wondered if their dreams were too powerful for anything as “mundane” as love to come into the equation.

Then again, she already felt it—love or something like it, bubbling up from the depths of herself. She already felt that she would follow Roberto to the ends of the earth, if he let her.

5

Present Day

It was eleven at night, the tail end of the opening party for the White Oak Lodge. Aurora, her siblings, her cousins, and the stable boys were on the beach in their swimsuits, some of them covered up in sweatshirts against the May evening, watching as fireworks exploded over the hotel. Gwen’s cast was now fully decorated in artworks, many of them from Aurora herself. Once upon a time, long before her parents had pushed her to do business school, Aurora had fancied herself an artist. Was that in the past now?

Kenny and Oren were off to the side, away from the Whitmore cousins, talking among themselves. Ever since Gwen’s accident, Aurora had felt a strange pull toward both of them, although her attraction felt firmly planted in Kenny, the moodier and more secretive of the two. What on earth was he thinking about? She knew he would never tell, which made everything all the more exciting.

She knew, too, that the two of them were trying to find a topic for their documentary, which they planned to start filming sooner rather than later. Over the previous few days, Aurora had been privy to several of their conversations, during which they’d tossed various historical Nantucket facts at one another. Many of those facts concerned shipwrecks and whaling. Sometimes they looked at Aurora, hoping that she could supply them with something, anything. But Aurora had just laughed and said, “I’m Italian. I don’t know anything about this island.” Although she desperately wished she did.