He let out a long sigh, the kind that dropped and hit every note in the scale. “It does not. That is how it works. Things like this happen and I do not tell him.”

We ordered a pizza with cherry tomatoes and mushrooms on it, and some beer. “Are you happy with Rocco?” I asked Giovanni.

Giovanni chewed on the thought for a second. “We were happy for a while,” he said. “We have been together for two years now, and I would say for the first year, we were happy ninety-five percent of the time. The next six months, seventy-five. The last six months I would say it has sunk to under fifty.”

The waitress dropped off our beers. “Salute,” we said, clinking glasses.

“We just get into these explosive fights,” Giovanni continued. “Look. I get it. I have been working on my novel for nearly five years now. I am lazy, but who isn’t? I come from money, I am entitled, I attempted to be part of the family business but left to go to pilot school, then I went to college in the UK, and then I dropped out to party for a year and re-enrolled. I have lived a whole life in my twenties and it is not even over yet. But Rocco. He remains in Rome his whole life. He has been comfortable. He thinks his art is his escape, but it is not going anywhere. I keep telling him if he would just go out and see the world, his art would soar. That is all I want for him. To succeed. I believe that is the real source of our fights. It is not because I am lazy, or slutty, or all the other things he accuses me of. It is his own failure.”

“Wow. The floodgates have come down,” I said, genuinely shocked that Giovanni would share so much with me.

Giovanni shrugged. “I cannot talk to anyone else about it.” He lit a cigarette and took a long drag, blowing the smoke across the table.

“You haven’t talked to Jahan or Neil about it?”

“God, no. Jahan is very close with Rocco, and besides, you know Jahan—he can cut someone out of this group just as quickly as he can bring them in,” Giovanni said. “Neil and I do not talk much, but I am sure he and Rocco hooked up at some point. He has a slutty history but wants to pretend he is a ‘good girl’ now.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes. Don’t let the domestic image fool you. Neil used to have more fun than all of us. He was a real troublemaker.”

I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why that made me feel sad, to think of Neil as anything but the committed boyfriend I knew him to be.

“What do you mean, Jahan can cut someone out?” I asked. “Has he done that before?”

Giovanni laughed. “Remember Gaetano?” I nodded; he was the one who read the story in Italian about how Jahan made him feel accepted. “Oh, that whole performance was bullshit. Jahan cannot stand Gaetano. He was part of our friend group for a while, but he got on Jahan’s nerves, and they had some kind of beef. Snip. We stopped seeing him.”