I went home for Christmas break, but only for ten days, because I was going to Venice for the remainder. And oh, that beautiful city was everything I’d imagined. It spoke right to my heart, the crumbling buildings, the canals, the decrepit, genteel beauty, the patterns of bricks, the beauty imbued in everything, even the rainspouts. I loved the garbagemen who chatted animatedly with each other, smoking, but who paused to give me an appreciative glance with “ciao, bellissima.” The riotous glory of stained glass in every church, the beautiful window boxes and brightly painted shutters. I took the water taxi to Murano and watched handsome men blowing glass, their arms brown and scarred. The beauty of the city, the foreignness of it, filled up parts of my soul I didn’t even know I had.

When I got back to school, I signed up for a summer session in Barcelona and found a waitressing job so I could pay for it.

A quick trip home, travel on break, back to New York. It became my pattern. My painting changed; the gentle landscapes that had gotten me into Pace were cast aside. Now I did mixed-media and monochromatic paintings. I tried sculpting. I started wearing only black (I know, I know). I got my nose pierced.

Noah visited when he could, which wasn’t often. He was apprenticing as a carpenter, working six days a week. When we were together, in bed, skin against skin, his light scruff gently scraping my cheek, our fingers intertwined, the red glow returned. But he kept asking about the next break, when I’d come home. When I did go back to Stoningham, I felt itchy—my mother, still the same but only on more committees; Juliet, securing her status as favorite by giving birth to a girl she and her perfect husband named after my mother.

And Noah. His love was so big and fierce it was like a dragon, waiting for me.

I could feel the resentment growing in him.

My return visits consisted of Noah and me sleeping together whenever and wherever possible, and seeing the two friends I’d kept in touch with from high school. My dad was the only one who asked me the questions I wanted to answer, who listened with real interest as I described the wonder of the Duomo di Milano’s rooftop, the hundreds of different shades of green in Ireland, that moment when I stood at the very tip of South Africa, one foot in the Indian Ocean, one in the Atlantic, and compared the shades of blue. He was the only one who didn’t ask when I was going to come home, the only one who believed I could succeed out in the world.

New York had its hooks in me, and I believed with all my heart that I would make it.