Page 67 of No Stone Unturned

“Thank God and all the saints. I’ve always dreamed about you saying that,” he said as his mouth crashed down on mine.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Lexi

I enjoyed the best night of sleep since coming to Italy. Even though things weren’t completely right with us, especially the unresolved Congo issue, it felt like we were healing—getting back on the right track as a couple. Perhaps getting stronger. But there was still a ways to go.

Since I’d been in Italy, I’d received four texts from Elvis, one from Finn, and two each from Basia and Gray. I’d answered all of them by saying I’d arrived in Italy, I was fine and I would explain everything later. I’d sent a special apology to Elvis without going into detail, and promised to come see him when I returned. I didn’t imagine anyone was satisfied by my abbreviated response. It was difficult to believe I actually had friends who cared that much about me.

I woke before Slash but stayed in bed. The balcony doors were open, the breeze felt wonderful. The curtains fluttered as sunshine dappled across the sheets. I snuggled against him, smiling as he pulled me tighter, resting his face in the crook of my neck. When he finally woke, we spent another hour or so in bed, cuddling and talking about things that had nothing to do with paternity, statues or Vatican intrigue. We’d stolen this time just for ourselves. While I wasn’t naive enough to think we could avoid confrontation forever, I wanted to hold these moments close.

When we finally got dressed, we sat on the balcony sipping coffee and watching the boats sail by. Finally Slash suggested we visit the Salerno Cathedral and do a little sightseeing downtown before we left for Gaeta. We packed up our stuff, but I was reluctant to leave our little haven. Slash seemed to sense my reluctance, because he pulled me in for one last lingering kiss on the balcony.

“We’ll come back,cara, when we have no other cares but each other,” he murmured.

I wondered if that would ever happen with us. Even though I doubted it, I touched my engagement ring with my thumb and said, “Deal.”

We checked out of the hotel and put our bags in the car. I returned the floppy hat to my head as Slash drove us downtown. We were detoured several times due to a huge city-wide parade in honor of the saints.

“You still want to fight the crowds to see the church?” Slash asked me as we inched along.

“We don’t have anything better to do, right? We’ve got time to kill and you told me the Salerno Cathedral is spectacular.”

“It is.”

“Then, let’s do it.”

Slash managed to find a parking spot near the bottom of a hill. We were getting out of the car when Slash’s phone rang. He motioned that he needed to take it, so I walked around to the back of the car and leaned against the trunk, waiting for him.

An elderly woman heading to the parade a couple of streets over was pushing a wheeled cart filled with colorful flowers and tacky saint souvenirs. She passed me and started up the path. She was struggling, as the cart was apparently heavy. Several people walked past her, but not one offered to help. I looked over at Slash, but he was still sitting in the car talking, so I approached her.

I spoke to her with a mixture of gestures and the few Italian phrases I knew. She seemed surprised I offered. I took the handles of the cart from her and pointed to me and then the top of the hill.

“I push it for you, okay?” I said.

She looked at me warily and then nodded.

I started pushing it up the hill and immediately understood why she was having problems. It was hard work. A third of the way up, I started panting. She walked beside me, gesturing and offering a constant stream of advice in Italian that I didn’t understand. A minute later I got it to the top of the hill, but I was sweating profusely beneath my hat. My T-shirt was dripping with perspiration. I wished I weren’t wearing jeans. Moisture slid from my scalp into my eyes, so I blinked rapidly and ignored the burning sensation.

The vantage from the hilltop was great. The parade was in full swing, a trio of musicians were playing an up-tempo song and two white horses with men sitting atop them in uniforms clopped past. A couple of cars with people waving motored by. Behind the cars a bishop in a white cassock and a tall miter on his head was walking, wielding an enormous wooden cross. It had to be made of cardboard or maybe balsa wood, because he seemed to be moving it with ease. Behind him was a choir, singing a religious hymn. Two priests dressed in black cassocks trailed immediately behind him, holding life-size posters of the saints-to-be on long wooden poles.

The old woman said something to me, and I realized I’d totally forgotten about her. “Oh, I’m sorry.Scusate.Here’s your cart.”

I angled the handles toward her, waiting patiently until she had a firm grasp on them before I let go. She profusely thanked me, and I turned to go back to Slash, feeling proud of my Good Samaritan moment.

At that moment, a teenager on a scooter zoomed past me on the right. He clipped my shoulder hard as he rocketed past, then shouted an apology. I stumbled forward, knocking into the elderly woman, who lost her grip on the cart. She lurched around me trying to grab the handles, but slipped, banging into the cart, which gave it a hard push forward. I managed to catch her beneath her elbow, but the cart started to accelerate down the hill, pausing for only a moment as it came to a slight rise.

Holy runaway cart!

I ensured the lady was stable before I dashed after it, my hat flying off my head. Four steps forward, I collided with another female passerby who must have seen the cart and had decided to stop it, too. Grabbing on to each other for balance, we watched, horrified, as the cart charged even faster downhill, picking up speed and bouncing merrily along toward the parade.

“Oh, crap!” I bolted after the cart.

It wasn’t a fair race because (1) the cart had a head start, and (2) I was wearing sandals, but I chased it just the same. I made respectable progress anyway. However, dealing with the sandals made it difficult to calculate whether I could reach the cart in time—especially if I factored in the exhaustion from pushing the cart up the hill in the first place, and adjusting for adrenaline. I also had no idea if I had the mass and distance to stop the cart once I reached it, given the coefficient of friction from the sandals.

My calculations, though admittedly hurried, suggested I had a slim chance, and that gave me an extra burst of speed. Though I was focused on the rampaging cart, I could see people turning and pointing. I wondered if they had heard the cart...or maybe they’d heard me. Was I screaming? Shrieking? Amid theslap, slap, slapof my sandals, I wondered under which tab on my Little Black Cloud Spreadsheet this moment would go. Most Humiliating Moments or Most Heroic Save?

The handles were almost within reach when the cart veered slightly and hit a curb. It went airborne, spinning on several axes while raining kitschy flowers, tea towels, keychains and pins across the crowd before it took out the bishop and crashed to a stop upside down on the far side of the street. The wheels kept spinning.

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