Lucia won't let me wear the black dress.
"It's giving funeral," she says, holding it up by one strap like it's evidence. "It's your birthday. You're not mourning."
"I like that dress."
"Babe, you wore that dress to three different places last month. I kept count. Three." She drops it on the floor — my floor, my dress, on the floor — and turns back to the wardrobe like she pays rent here. "You have clothes. Actual clothes. Why do you dress like you're trying to disappear?"
"I don't—"
"You do. You absolutely do." She's pulling things out one by one, barely looking at them before tossing them onto my bed. She pulls out a red one I forgot existed. Tight. Short. I bought it in London two years ago, wore it once to a bar with Priya, spent the whole night tugging it down while Priya kept telling me to stop because I looked incredible. I didn't believe her. That was about a month before everything with her and Marcus came out and she stopped being someone whose opinion I cared about.
"Lucia, no."
"Lucia, yes."
"It's too much."
"It's your birthday and you're twenty-five and you're going to look like it." She throws it at me and it lands on my shoulder. "Put it on. Bathroom. Now. I'm doing your makeup and I swear to God Bella if you argue with me one more time I'm calling Valentina and she will physically hold you down."
"You're so dramatic."
"You are right. Move."
I take the dress into the bathroom because fighting Lucia is like fighting weather — you can complain about it all you want but it's still going to rain on you. I pull it on and it fits different than it did in London. My hips fill it out more, my chest sits different in it. I've been cooking here, actually cooking, not surviving on toast and whatever Marcus left in the fridge that I was too tired to throw out. I turn in the mirror and pull my hair over one shoulder and something lifts in my chest. Not confidence exactly but close to it. Surprise maybe. Like oh. You're still in there underneath everything.
"Let me see!" Lucia bangs on the door.
"Hold on—"
"I'm not holding on, open it."
I open it. She stares at me. Her mouth opens and she points at me with one finger and she doesn't say anything for about four seconds which is genuinely a record for Lucia Ferretti because this girl has never met a silence she didn't want to fill.
"I knew it," she says. "I knew that dress was in there for a reason. God is real."
"Stop."
"God is real and she wants you to have the best night of your life tonight."
"I'm going to change—"
"Sit down." She pushes me onto the toilet lid and pulls out a makeup bag that's twice the size of my actual handbag. "Close your eyes and let me work. Don't talk. Don't move. Just sit there and let me make you beautiful."
"Wow, thanks."
"More beautiful. Shut up."
She stands over me close enough that her perfume is all I can breathe and it's too strong like it always is but I'll never tell her because she bought that bottle in Rome on a trip she saved three months for and she's proud of it and sometimes you just let people have their things.
Her fingers are gentle on my face, the brush moving across my eyelids , and I sit still because there's something about letting someone take care of you that I forgot I liked. In London nobody touched my face like this. Nobody stood this close to me without me wanting to pull back. I didn't even realize how long it had been until right now, sitting on a toilet lid in my dad's old house while a girl I've known for ten months hums a song I don't recognize and blends something warm along my cheekbone.
"Open."
I open my eyes. She holds up her phone camera so I can see and the girl looking back at me looks like someone I used to know before London took her away.
"Yeah?" Lucia is grinning so wide I can see her back teeth.
"Yeah."
"YEAH. Okay, we're leaving before you change your mind. Shoes are by the door, I already picked them.
The club is packed by the time we get there, bass so heavy I feel it in my teeth before we're even through the door. Lucia knows the bouncer, obviously, because Lucia knows someone everywhere she goes. I'm genuinely convinced this girl could walk into a stranger's wedding in another country and leave with five new contacts and a dinner invitation.
Valentina is outside smoking which she only does when she's been drinking which means she started without us and she's already on her way to becoming the version of herself that has no volume control. She sees me, and the cigarette almost falls out of her hand.
"BELLA!" She grabs my face with both hands and kisses both my cheeks and then holds me at arm's length to look at the dress and her eyes go wide. "Who is this? Who IS this person?"
"It's still me, Val."
"No. No no no. I'm obsessed with her. She's my new best friend, I've decided."
"I'm standing right here," Lucia says, hand on her chest.
"You did this?" Valentina gestures at me like I'm a gallery piece.
"I did that."
"You're a genius. An actual genius. Someone get this girl a trophy."
Sara is already inside, already seated in a booth she secured through methods I will never understand because there's a queue of people waiting for tables and Sara is just sitting there .There's a bottle on the table, standing there like a statement. Sara doesn't believe in pacing herself and she doesn't believe anyone else should either.
She pours five glasses before we've even fully sat down and slides one across the table toward me without looking up from her phone.
"Birthday girl drinks first."
"Sara, what is this?"
"Prosecco."
"This doesn't taste like prosecco."
"It's prosecco with intentions. Drink it and stop asking questions."
Lucia's friend Daria arrives about twenty minutes later. She's tall in a way that makes me want to ask if she's ever been scouted for something, dark hair cut sharp at her jaw, and she walks in like the room was already expecting her. She sits down next to me like we've been friends since high school and orders a drink without even glancing at the menu.
"So you're the birthday girl." She looks at me directly, warmly, no pretense at all.
"That's me."
"How's twenty-five?"
"It's been about hours so I don't have a full review yet."
She laughs and it's the kind of laugh that makes you want to keep going, keep being funny, just to hear it again.
We drink and we talk over each other and the music and the noise of the club until everything blurs into one warm loud beautiful mess. Valentina is telling a story about a date she went on last week with a guy who brought his mother to the restaurant. Not called his mother. Not ran into his mother. Brought her. On purpose. To the table.
"He said she was just in the area!" Valentina's hands are everywhere. "In the area! At nine PM! At the specific restaurant he booked two days in advance!"
"No," Daria says, leaning forward.
"YES. And she sat down. She sat down at our table, Daria. She picked up the menu. She ordered."
"What did she order?" Sara asks, completely serious.
"Lobster, Sara. She ordered the lobster. The most expensive thing on the entire menu. This woman looked me dead in the eye and ordered lobster like I wasn't sitting across from her son on what was supposed to be a date."
"Did you stay?" I ask because I genuinely need to know.
"I stayed for the bread. The bread was really good. And then I told him I was going to the bathroom and I left through the kitchen. The chef held the door open for me. I think he understood."
The table is screaming. Sara is bent forward laughing so hard no sound is coming out. Lucia keeps shaking her head saying "no, no, no" like each new detail physically hurts her. Daria has her hand over her mouth and her shoulders are shaking. And I'm laughing too, l the kind that makes your stomach hurt and your eyes burn and I can't remember the last time I laughed like this. London didn't have this. London had Priya, who I loved, who I trusted, who sat on my couch eating my food listening to me cry about Marcus while she was sleeping with him. London had quiet pubs where I sat next to a man who liked me small and I made myself small because I thought that's what keeping someone looked like.
This is different. These girls are loud and messy and they take up space and they don't need me to be anything other than here. I love them for it even though I'll probably never say it out loud because I'm still the kind of person who holds things like that too close to her chest.
"Okay," Lucia stands up and claps her hands once like a teacher calling a class to order. "We're dancing. Everyone up. Right now. No arguments."
"I need at least one more drink before I—" Sara starts.
"Bring it with you. Bella, come on."
Upstairs is different. Darker, the music heavier, bass that vibrates up through the floor into your legs and settles in your hips. The lights sweep across the ceiling in slow waves of blue and purple and everyone up here is closer, moving slower, bodies pressed together in the dark like the music is holding all of them .
Lucia pulls me into the crowd and I let her. Valentina is already gone, eyes closed, hands in the air, existing in her own world where nothing matters except the beat.Daria moves beside me and we fall into a rhythm without trying.
I let my body catch it. Let the bass tell my hips what to do. The drink sits warm in my blood and I can feel it in my cheeks and my fingertips and the looseness in my shoulders where I usually carry everything. I close my eyes and for once my brain goes quiet.No mum's text I haven't replied to. No case files on my desk. Just music and movement and the feeling of being inside my own body without wanting to escape it.
We dance until I'm overheated and my throat is dry and I need water before I pass out on this floor in a red dress and give Valentina a story worse than the lobster mother.
"Getting water," I shout at Lucia.
She nods but she's not really listening, she's dancing with Daria and they've got this thing going where they're mirroring each other and laughing every time they sync up.
Downstairs is cooler, the air hitting my damp skin and raising goosebumps along my arms. I lean against the bar and push my hair off my neck and wait for the bartender to notice me. My feet are already aching in Lucia's shoes, a dull throb across the balls of my feet that I know is going to be worse tomorrow.
I glance down the bar while I wait.
And that's when I see him.