And then, a little less than a year ago, my master’s advisor contacted me and told me about an internship opportunity. Computational physics. Fluid dynamics. Jupiter’s moon Io, and all those deliciously active volcanoes. Right up my alley.

If I accepted, I would have to move to a suburb of Geneva.

“It’s fucking amazing,” Eli said when I told him, with the same smile he got after winning a beer league hockey game. Proud. Exultant. Gratified. “Visiting scientist at CERN? Gets you bragging rights forever, Maya. It’s all downhill from here.”

“Maybe. But the last time I moved so far away, I was basically storming out and slamming the door. So leaving again, feels like…I don’t know.”

His eyebrow rose. He clasped my shoulder with his heavy hand. “It’s not the same at all. You’re leaving to go toward something. Not running away.” And that wasn’t wrong. Except, Eli didn’t quite have all the information.

And he still doesn’t.

“Good?” the driver asks, pointing at the AC and catching my eyes through the rearview mirror. He takes a turn, and the little tree air freshener swings back and forth. Arbre Magique, it happily proclaims. “More? More cold?”

I shake my head and smile, which earns me my second wink of the day.

Are he and I flirting? Am I about to embark on a steamy affair with a spry septuagenarian (or a particularly rough-looking quinquagenarian)? Are older guys a toxic pattern I’m stuck to? Will I—

“Isn’t this stunning?” Avery asks, and I’m genuinely relieved to be pulled back from that winding road.

“Yeah. This place has no right to be this beautiful.”

We’re almost in Taormina, our final destination, which is only about an hour from the airport. Despite my countless weekend trips all over Europe during undergrad, all fueled by cheap airfare and even cheaper hostels that always seemed just a heartbeat away from breaking into orgies, I’ve never been to southern Italy, or on one of the islands. The farther we move from Catania, the harder my forehead presses against the window. The hills roll past us, blanketed in olive groves and vineyards, so healthy and round and abundant under the late-morning sun, I feel almost taunted. Farmland turns into villages made of white stone, pockets of thick forests and shrubbery, and then…

God, the ocean.

“What was the name of this sea?” I ask Avery, watching the light bounce off the shimmery water. Not the Tyrrhenian. Not the Mediterranean, either. “Ionic?”

“Ionian,” she corrects me. Her tone is graceful—the one of intelligent, well-rounded people who don’t wish to make others feel ignorant or inferior. Because for the past hour, she’s been nothing but graceful. Tiny adores her, too, and she reciprocates: when he kissed her cheek with his sloppy tongue, she didn’t even pull back. I’m going to need this woman to do something objectionable, stat. I need permission to entertain uncharitably mean thoughts about her. I will not like you, Avery. Stop being great.

“Oh, right. Is it your first time here?”