“You know,” I say, “I’m going to head home, I think.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m not feeling so hot.”

“Okay, well listen. I think Sandra is right, we should try you out with Anders. Why don’t you come to team practice on Monday?”

All I can do is nod. By Monday, I’ll be long gone. I hug Gianluca, and take one last deep breath of the skin on his neck.

“Goodbye, G,” I say, my voice muffled.

“Goodbye,” he says, “for now?” He pulls back and looks at me. Despite everything, I kiss him.

Epilogue

ONCE AGAIN I’m on a flight leaving Buenos Aires and what lies on the other side is uncertain. What I do know is that when I land this time, it will not be to the news of the worst thing that’s ever happened. That moment has come and gone. All there is to do now is carry on and put years between me and it: to let those memories be crowded out by different ones, so that eventually they take up less of my soul.

My parents will be waiting for me on the other end. I don’t know how they’ll react to what I’m going to tell them, but I know that they’ll support whatever I do next. We are all we have now. Or not quite all. I’ve e-mailed Blair to let him know I’m en route. He offered to be at the airport when I landed, but I asked if we could wait a day or two. I love Blair; I have always loved Blair, I realize now, having made it through to the other side of hell. But I need time to figure out what this means in my new life, time to be able to trust myself and my own decisions after this mess with G.

None of us get a happy ending because Buenos Aires wasn’t the end of anything, but rather an interlude from which we all emerge, if not quite renewed, then altered in fundamental ways.

Cali goes back to playing the cello, first in Paris, then in Berlin, and then, at last, back in her beloved New York. Many years later, a wave of scandals sweeps up Cali’s abuser and ends his career, with Cali bravely adding her voice to the chorus against him, a chorus which, for the first time in history, is listened to.

Gemma returns to London and, after a very difficult year, reaches an armistice with her ex-husband, and they become mutually respectful, if not exactly affectionate, coparents to their two little girls.

I learn all of this from the e-mails that the three of us periodically exchange long after we’ve left Buenos Aires for good. The happy ending is we all get another chance, another chapter.