With her looking so strange, Luca and I, out of respect, to give her space, stopped trying to reach her. And she stopped coming home to visit—we became like distant relatives. One of our cousins suggested it might be stress: her hair loss was unnatural, it was thinning out, but it wasn’t cancer, and it wasn’t drugs; once that was established, we accepted the vagueness of the rest.

Meanwhile, Luca was going to meetings of the center-left and I was lying around in my room reading and listening to rap for entire afternoons. He read, too, and I’d go to his meetings like it was a religion I couldn’t help but accept. Both of us studied at Sapienza and continued to live at our parents’, sleeping in our small childhood bedrooms. Irene’s name didn’t come up. If Rome was playing Bologna, we’d find a reason not to watch the game at home; if TG1 programs discussed an underground comic-book writer from Bologna on the anniversary of his death, we’d get up to clear the table mid-dinner.

Irene was invited home for Christmas and Easter, but she never came, and for us, her steadfast refusal was an admission of guilt. She’d really gone to Bologna to satisfy some strange type of pleasure and was ashamed to be seen: she’d made “alternative choices.”

As it happened, she graduated on time, with honors, and found a paid internship at a Milan fashion house. One night, my father announced, through my mother, that since the fashion industry was in Milan, they’d “be buying Irene a place to live.” My father interrupted my mother to add that Irene seemed to be “nicely situated” in Milan, thanks to her “close-knit relationships from fashion school.”

Suddenly we had our sister back, after years of not hearing from her, except the occasional phone call. We told her we’d help her move her stuff from Rome and Bologna to her place in Milan.

We rented a truck and loaded up what she’d abandoned in her childhood home; she came down to Rome in the morning to avoid running into our father, and she chose what she wanted, and afterward we left for Bologna. There, we emptied out her studio apartment. It looked over a street we barely glanced at, because it seemed like a street that had seen everything, a dangerous street, where wrong choices had brought so many desperate people together, at least that’s how it felt to us. Luca and I were briskly courteous, unselfishly hurried, the style on our mother’s side of the family, to avoid going where we didn’t want to go. While we knew our sister wanted us to take a walk so she could show us around the neighborhood she was leaving, we were, no, no, “it’s time to get going, dear!”