The next day, I recommended Eleonora for an internship at my publishing house, and when I told her the editor in chief had approved, she started crying again and gave me a big hug, because this time I’d told her in person, at a bar, and she glued herself to me. That night she stayed over at the young female writer’s after breaking up with her boyfriend.

She’d finally gotten into publishing: she went back home to live with her family in the same small town near Milan; from there, she’d commute to the office for her internship, two points in orbit around Milan that held her exclusive attention until she was hired on as an editor. Her mother was happy to devote herself to packing a metal schiscetta with Eleonora’s lunch and getting her healthy again. Early on in her internship, Eleonora regained the weight she’d lost, regained her figure, her red hair and freckles became bright again. She started seeing a young accountant in her town.

And that’s when she and I began our secret affair.

I haven’t been able to figure out what this next part means, and so I keep cutting details, pages, whole chapters, hoping to get down to the bone: the two of us standing by a glass wall on the sixth floor, admiring the torrential summer rain coming down, taking a short break from a meeting with the editor in chief, who’d been assigning books to each editor, our colleagues returning from their smoke break downstairs, or from the bathroom. I couldn’t ask her outright if she’d gone to bed with the editor in chief, and I felt like an idiot, standing there, silent, thinking that since he’d just proposed—without consulting me—that she handle the autobiography of a very old writer who lived on the Lombard lake where the director also had a small villa, then this meant the two of them were lovers, because that writer was too old to leave the house and she’d actually be the one writing the book, interviewing him, putting the transcribed interviews, letters, and diaries together for him to work on. She’d stay over with the writer and his caretaker a few days a week. I could picture her scuttling out of the villa and into the editor’s car.