Page 10 of A Winter in New York

“Excuse me, sir,” she called, craning her neck to look at him over the piano top when he took a seat at a table with his coffee. “Do you have an admission ticket for this concert? It’s very exclusive.”

He patted his jean pockets and pulled out his cinema ticket from earlier. “Right here,” he said, laying it on the table.

She nodded, flexing her fingers. “Any requests?”

“You choose,” he said, and something in the way he held her gaze turned her stomach in slow somersaults.

“Okay,” she murmured, placing her fingers on the keys asshe mentally flicked the pages of the songbook in her head.Ah, of course.Biting her lip, she closed her eyes as she began to play, and she kept them closed as she sang the opening lines of Madonna’s “Crazy For You.” It wasn’t the kind of song she sang with the band, but it was wall to wall on the radio just now and she secretly loved it.

She meant every smoky word she sang to her intimate audience of one, the low-setting summer sun casting golden hues across her face. She opened her eyes for the final chorus and found Santo standing close by with his hand resting on the piano top, and the raw vulnerability on his face almost sent the lyrics clean out of her head.

“Did you mean it when you said you wanted to stay here forever?” he said.

“Yes?” she said. “No? I don’t know. If every day could be like today, then yes, but that’s not real life, is it?”

He rounded the piano and sat beside her on the stool, his face close to hers.

“But what if it was like this every day? You and me? I know you’re supposed to leave for the rest of the tour, but you could stay here, we could make a real go of things maybe. I could make you gelato every day…”

She reached out and placed her hand on his cheek. “Santo, I…We don’t —”

He leaned in and kissed his name out of her mouth. “Don’t say another word,” he whispered. “Think about it tonight?”

Viv allowed herself to momentarily imagine the life she could build here in New York. Would it work? Could she be happy working alongside Santo in the gelateria, settling herself down here, becoming part of his story? Or would shealways wonder what might have happened if she’d stuck to her plan and followed her dreams? She’d spent her entire eighteen years clinging on to the edges of life by her fingertips, eating at other people’s tables, sleeping in other people’s beds, and she was, frankly, exhausted. The random meeting with Louis had finally set her free from having to depend on other people for the food in her belly or the roof over her head—giving up that hard-won freedom and fragile sense of security on the off-chance this thing with Santo became something more was a huge gamble. She’d fought so hard for this dream, and she wasn’t sure she was ready to start on a new one just yet, as beautiful as Santo made it sound.

“I’ll think about it tonight,” she said, pressing her forehead against his. “I promise.”

—

Viv crawled into hersmall bunk in the band’s apartment an hour later, her head spinning with images of Santo, the painted glass door at Belotti’s gelateria, and the evocative pull of being invited into a proper family. She’d lived her whole life alone, more or less—looking at the Belotti family history up on the wall in the gelateria had twisted her heart with envy. She closed her eyes and tried to see herself behind that counter alongside Santo in five years, then ten, then twenty. Would they go the distance? Have children, grow old together? Would his hair turn grey, her limbs soften with the fat of contentment? It felt like an impossible dream, not something that happened to people like Viv. And then she thought of the band, and Louis, and the string of gigs set up across America. She loved performing more than anythingelse in the world. Would she regret giving up this golden opportunity to make a name for herself? She spent the small hours of the morning turning the decision over in her head, wondering which path to walk, which to leave untrodden and wild. To have either would be once-in-a-lifetime precious.

4.

“What am I supposed todo here, Bobby?”

Bobby places a coffee on the side table and sprawls on the blue velvet armchair opposite mine in his oak-floored penthouse. Bottles clank down below as bins are emptied on the early-morning city streets, sirens and horns, the sounds of New York being refreshed for another new day. I’m not feeling at all refreshed—I’ve seen almost every hour through the night and have brought my troubled conscience upstairs to Bobby.

“I’m literally the only person in the world who can help Belotti’s right now,” I say. “Isn’t that bizarre?”

He reaches for his coffee cup. We’re already on our second—he’s listened to my long-winded story and looked at my mother’s photo of Santo in her scrapbook, the most he’s heard about my history since I’ve been here. It’s credit to him that he answered my six-in-the-morning wake-up knock without grumble, and probably just as well that Robin is away on business. I’m super fond of Bobby’s husband, but sharing my mother’s secret with one person feels like an indiscretion; with two might have felt impossible. As it is, I’m grateful to have someone to share the load.

“The fact you even noticed that door at the festival is acosmic nudge.” He mimes shoving me with both hands and raises his eyebrows. “You could just email them the recipe and never go back?”

“I’ve thought of that. But what would I say? I can’t tell you how I know it, but here’s your closely guarded secret recipe?” I throw in some jazz hands. “Because I don’t for a second think that would be the end of it, do you?”

“They might just be so relieved that they don’t ask any questions,” Bobby says, although his face tells me he doesn’t even believe that himself.

“Unlikely,” I say. “They’ve traded on this top-secret family recipe story for the last hundred years—the fact it’s known by someone on the outside would be a shock for them.”

“Or…how aboutIsend it to them?” he suggests. “I’ll say, oh I don’t know, I once knew this British chef who looked like Zooey Deschanel if you squinted and she made this fabulous gelato from a secret old Italian recipe she only ever shared with me to serve exclusively at my noodle restaurant, and just maybe, by some outlandish coincidence it’s the exact same…”

I roll my eyes at his daily attempt at a recipe-grab.

“I’m serious, Bob. Santo was the young love of my mum’s life, and now he’s ill and I’m the only person who can save his family business.”

Bobby looks at me over his steepled fingers, serious. “But would she want you to?”

It’s the question that’s kept me awake through the night. On the one hand, I’m absolutely certain she wouldn’t want me to expose the fact that Santo shared his family secret. I don’t know the Belotti family, but having scoured their website and been inside the gelateria, family loyalty and prideruns wild in their blood. And that gelato…it meant a great deal to me and my mother over the years, it sustained us through good and bad times. If it means that much to me, I can’t imagine how much it means to the Belottis, how betrayed they would feel to discover someone else knows their secret too. But at the same time, the joy the recipe has brought me feels like a debt I should repay.

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