I flew home for the judge’s decision on a Thursday and held my mom’s hand with white knuckles as we waited. There was no jury in a dependency case such as this one: just one man who held our fate in his hands. As I listened to his words, I felt like I was in a vehicle that was being submerged, water rushing in from all sides. He’d considered all of the evidence and testimony and was recommending the child stay with her mother.

After all that, nothing changed.

After all that we’d been through, after drawing the line in the sand that cut Penny and Ava out of our lives, nothing changed.

Back in Park City, I was a mess. Luke tried to be supportive, but it was clear he was losing patience with the whole thing.

“I know it’s been rough,” he’d say, “but it’s over. Gotta move on, right?”

He was wrong. It wasn’t over.

Liz Is in It Now

FOR THE next two weeks, I’m barely present in my life when I’m not with Gianluca. My world has been sharply divided into being with him, when I sink into a primal kind of ecstasy that makes me forget I even have a mind or a past, and without him, when I’m replaying moments with him, when my body is remembering his.

The rest of the time I’m with Gemma and Edward and the dance team. I realize that they have given me what I’d missed most about my old life: the easy, uncomplicated friendship of my teammates. And, one by one, it comes out that it was not only Cali and Anders who had gone through something that turned their lives upside down before coming to Buenos Aires. Breakups, death, ruined careers—it seems everyone came here to forget something.

One day, I run into Beau and Valentina while I’m leading a tour through the Plaza de Mayo; Beau plays a song on his phone and they do part of their routine right there in the street, delighting my tour group.

Mostly, I see Gianluca alone late at night, and after the first time, we’re never at his place, always at mine. He never spends the night and I pretend that it doesn’t bother me. He says he can’t sleep in unfamiliar beds. Then why meet here and not at his apartment? I don’t ask because I don’t really want to know the answer.

When we’re alone together, G makes me feel like I am the only woman who’s ever existed. Physically, being with him is like a drug, and it makes me grateful to have a body.