They had promised one another nothing, after all. She had never pictured a future with Kamal, never imagined their love would last. They didn’t share the same culture, or the same god, or the same traditions. And yet their skin was a flawless match. Kamal’s body fitted hers so perfectly. With him, Giulia felt more alive than at any other time in her life. She was disturbed by the violent desire that gripped her and kept her awake at night, that drove her trembling from her bed every morning. The feelings that took her back to him each day. This man she had only just met, and knew nothing about, or very little, had touched her more deeply than anyone before.

This isn’t love, she thought, trying to persuade herself. It was something else. Something she had to let go.

She didn’t even know where to send the letter. She had no idea where he lived. He told her once that he shared a room with another worker, somewhere on the outskirts of town. It didn’t matter. Giulia would leave the letter in the cave where they always met. She would put it under a seashell next to the rock where they had embraced so many times.

Their story would end there, she told herself, as if by accident, the same way it had started.

She did not sleep that night. Sleep had deserted her the moment she discovered what lay in her father’s desk drawer. She would watch as the hours passed, one by one. Sleepless, anxious nights, as if day would never break. She had lost even the strength to read, and lay still, like a stone, a prisoner of the dark.

She would have to announce the closure of the workshop to the women. She knew it was up to her, she couldn’t count on her sisters, or her mother. The women who were more than her workmates – her friends, she would have to send them away. There would be nothing to soften the blow, nothing to share except bitter tears. She knew what the workshop meant to each one of them. Some had spent their whole lives there. What would become of La Nonna? Who would hire her now? Alessia, Gina, Alda – they were all over fifty, a critical age on today’s job market. What of Agnese, who was alone with her children now that her husband had left her?

And Federica, whose parents were no longer there to help her? Giulia had tried to put off the moment she dreaded, like a painful operation. But face it she must. Tomorrow I will talk to them, she told herself. And the thought of it destroyed her and kept her awake.