Page 90 of The Road to You
Julia doesn’t press. She dabs a bit of concealer under my eye with a featherlight touch, but I can feel her curiosity building.
“Why didn’t you try long distance?” she asks softly after a beat. “I mean…forgive me for prying, but it’s kind of obvious. You’re still in love with him.”
I inhale slowly. The air feels thick in my lungs. I hate how easily my eyes sting. “Because fairy tales don’t exist,” I whisper.
She pauses, sponge in hand. “That’s…bleak,” she says, not unkindly. “Especially coming from someone who makes a living pretending they do.”
I laugh, but it’s small, humorless. “Yeah, well…pretending is easy. Living it?” I shake my head. “We live on different continents, Julia—different time zones. I’m here, working twelve-hour days on a set that’s chewing me up, and he’s over there, trying to put himself back together. What were we supposed to do? Text good morning and hope it doesn’t fall apart?”
She studies my face in the mirror. “But you don’t know that it would’ve fallen apart. You didn’t even try.”
“That’s the thing.” My voice is steadier now, but there’s something brittle underneath. “I didn’t want to try. Not because I didn’t love him, but because I did. Because I still do. I didn’t want to stretch something beautiful until it broke. I didn’t want to ruin it.”
Julia is quiet again. The room is filled with just the gentle tap of a brush against powder. She’s letting me speak, letting me spill.
“I want to remember him like that,” I continue. “Like in that photo: laughing, happy, full of life. Not through a screen at two a.m., fighting about missed calls and timing and not being able to touch him. I didn’t want to become his regret.”
I feel the tremble in my hands and press them into my thighs. “I didn’t want him to wake up someday and hate me for being the reason he gave up everything he worked for.”
Julia finally sets the brush down and turns me slightly in the chair to face her. “Maybe he wouldn’t have. Maybe he’d have chosen you anyway.”
I look at her, blinking away the tears threatening to spill. “And maybe we’d have resented each other. Or maybe we would’ve lasted three months and ended it over a bad phoneconnection and missed flights. I didn’t want ‘what ifs.’ I wanted to leave it while it was still good. While I could still close my eyes and remember what it felt like to fall in love under the Italian sun.”
Julia tilts her head. “Do you still talk?”
I shake my head. “Not once. Not since the airport.”
“Do you think he moved on?”
That question slices deeper than I expect. “Maybe,” I whisper. “I hope he’s happy. I want that for him. But God, some nights I wish he’d call. Just once. Just to say he misses me too.”
Julia places a gentle hand on my shoulder. “You know, fairy tales…they’re not perfect. But sometimes, they find their way back around.”
I meet her eyes. “You really believe that?”
She gives me a small, knowing smile. “I work in a trailer where people play make-believe all day. But the realest love stories I’ve seen are the ones that don’t go according to script.”
I look down at my script, the one waiting for me to channel heartbreak I don’t have to fake.
Because I already feel it. Every day.
35
MICHELE
The cold December air burns my lungs with each inhale. It’s the kind of sharp, biting chill that cuts through sweat and settles into bone, but I welcome it. Ineedit. It keeps me awake and focused.
My foot presses gently against the ball, guiding it forward along the turf. Not a sprint. Not even a jog. Just controlled movement, what my therapist calls “progressive reintroduction to strain.” It’s not flashy, not even close to what I’m used to do, but it’s something. For a long time, I wasn’t sure I’d ever get even this far.
One step, then another. Controlled. Measured. When I plant and gently tap the ball back to myself, the movement is fluid. Not perfect, but mine again.
Marco stands a few meters away, bundled in a puffy coat and scarf like he’s filming in the Arctic, his phone steady in one hand. “Give me a smile,” he says, grinning like an idiot. “Make it look like you’re having the time of your life, come on.”
I force one. It’s thin. Hollow. Fake. But it’s all I have.
I go through another set of drills—slow ball control. Light passing against a wall. Nothing dynamic yet. No jumping, nofast pivots. Just slow, careful reminders of what I used to do effortlessly. Each motion makes my grafted muscle tug, like a foreign thread stitched inside me. The pain is there, deep, dull, but it’s pain with purpose. And that, at least, is something I can live with.
Marco stops filming as I limp over to the bench and sit down slowly, wiping the sweat from my neck with a towel. “You’re ahead of schedule,” he says, passing me a water bottle. “Dr. Conti said he’s never seen a muscle flap recover this fast in someone your age. You’re killing it, man.”
