“Nico, what you said to Marcello about Isabella earlier . . .”

“He knows what I meant.” He drains the last of his glass. “So do you.”

“Isn’t that over?”

“Maybe it is. Or, at least, we will be soon.”

“I meant her affair with her boss.”

He raises his empty glass to the waiter and jiggles it. “So Isabella says.”

“You don’t think you can trust her again?”

“Not sure I want to try.”

“Your children, they’re so young. Don’t you owe it to them?”

“People make mistakes,” he mutters. “All the time.”

“Exactly.”

“For example, you and me.”

“It wasn’t a mistake, Nico. We were young. Ambitious. We chose our careers over our relationship. Remember?”

“Precisely.” He swallows. “Too young to know better.”

His pained expression softens her resolve. “How could it have ever worked for us?”

“We were in love, Alana. We could have made it work. We should have.” He reaches out and takes her wrist, gently caressing it between his fingers. The touch has less impact than she expected. “Perhaps we still can?”

The waiter interrupts to sweep up his glass and replace it with a full one. As soon as he’s gone, Alana asks, “And the drinking?”

“For two or three years, I hardly drank,” he says with an indifferent shrug. “Then I found out about Isabella and Roberto . . . Perhaps I was just a coward. Hiding in the bottle.” He searches her eyes. “Then you came back.”

Alana doesn’t know how to respond. She struggles to separate her sympathy for Nico from other emotions.

“I tried to call you,” a voice says behind her. “A bunch of times.”

Alana jerks her arm free of Nico’s grasp. She glances over her shoulder to see Byron striding for the table. “My phone is in my bag,” she says. “Didn’t hear it ring.”

Byron glances from Alana to Nico and back. “I didn’t mean to interrupt personal time.”

“And yet you did,” Nico says.

Alana ignores the remark. “What’s going on, Byron?”

“Naples.”

“Naples?” She frowns. “What about it?”

“There’s a new case of plague there.”

Alana goes cold. “In a traveler from Genoa? Like the one in Rome?”

Byron shakes his head. “She’s a local drug addict who hasn’t left Naples in years.”

“How, Byron?” she presses.

“No idea. But she has the bubonic, not pneumonic, plague.”

“So she must have got it from a fleabite?” Nico says.

“Brilliant deduction,” Byron says.

The implication hits Alana like a punch to her stomach. “How the fuck does an infected rat get from Genoa to Naples?”

Chapter

Forty-Three

Rome? He wonders if he misheard. He turns up the volume on the TV and focuses on the words spoken by the anchorwoman while trying to avoid looking at her. There is no doubt. She is discussing Rome.

“The man suffering from the plague had flown from Genoa to Rome two days prior to his admission to the hospital,” the anchorwoman says. “All fellow travelers on the plane have been placed on home quarantine. So far there have been no other reported cases in Rome, but officials across the city are on the highest alert.”