A Wedding In November
The engagement party was held at Leo's mother's apartment on Via de' Bardi, which had been Leo's grandmother's apartment before her, which everyone involved agreed was a way of saying *family*. Giulia had flown up to Florence on the Friday morning, and had spent the afternoon at a hairdresser Leo's mother had recommended, and had eaten no lunch because she had been too busy being asked questions she did not feel like answering about a building nobody at Via de' Bardi would ever see.
By seven she was standing near the fireplace in a dress that was the wrong colour for her — not wrong objectively, but wrong against the particular green she had been seeing for six weeks — and Leo had his hand on the small of her back and was introducing her to a woman called Ludovica whose husband ran a hedge fund and who gave very good parties.
"And this is Giulia, my fiancée. Ludovica, you'll adore her. She's a restoration architect. She's been — she's still doing the lighthouse thing."
"The lighthouse thing," said Ludovica, with the kind of smile that people used when they intended to remember nothing.
"In Liguria. Some charming little tower. She'll tell you about it."
Giulia did not tell her about it. She said, "It's going well, thank you," and Ludovica said, "How marvellous," and then they were already moving away, because Leo had seen someone else across the room, someone important, and