Keira sat back and sighed, knowing already what kind of feedback she’d get from Elliot. She was still holding back, not really including herself in the piece or her romance. But how was she supposed to involve herself?

In Capri, I fell for an Italian Lothario. In Venice, I fell out of a gondola.

She laughed bitterly and scratched the sentence out. She knew she had to involve herself more personally in her piece but she just couldn’t make a fool out of herself so publicly in that way. Even though it was the brave thing to do, she’d been humiliated enough being witnessed by so many people that she didn’t want her audience to know about it too.

But that left her unsure about where the piece was going, torn between the safe bet and the riskier option which was what Elliot wanted.

She tried a few different passages, inserting her doomed romance with Cristiano only to rip it up or scribble it out again. Usually, on her laptop the process was much quicker. But writing by hand and being forced to slow down had the side effect of making her really feel every word she wrote. Going over the finer details of things with Cristiano was making her sad. It was like a perpetual feedback loop; her words bringing her down, her mood darkening the tone of her words in turn. The loneliness of early-morning Venice seemed to mirror the loneliness she felt without Cristiano. Her yearning to return home grew even stronger.

But like her mom had said, this was her dream job. If Keira had the power to go back in time and tell the recently graduated version of herself that in a few years’ time she’d be writing travel articles in Venice, she’d have been thrilled. But the reality was different. Her career did not exist in a vacuum. On one hand she was behaving like a brat for wanting to quit, but on the other she had a very valid reason for wanting to walk away. Her personal and professional lives were not two separate things. They intertwined. One affected the other and vice versa, a continuous loop of cause and effect. Life imitating art imitating life. That was why it was she who was supposed to be the Romance Guru, rather than Denise or Lisa or any of the other writers at Viatorum. It was because she allowed her personal life to encroach on her professional life that she was given these assignments in the first place, and that meant putting her heart on the line time and time again. She just didn’t know whether she had the energy to keep doing it.

As the day progressed, Keira watched the square transform. Tarpaulins and stalls were erected ready for the celebrations. Large vats of soup were brought into the square, the aroma of chickpeas, celery, carrots, onions, tomatoes, and pork making Keira’s mouth water. There were also stacks of different breads, a sweet variety made with raisins, crumbled biscuits, cinnamon, and chocolate; another made with figs and walnuts.