I left Milan before the city had properly woken up.
The streets were still damp from the night before, early light catching in the puddles and the dark glass of shop fronts, and I walked to the car with my keys already in my hand because I didn't want to slow down. I didn't want to stand still long enough to reconsider. I had been reconsidering for weeks, and I was done with it.
I didn't look back at the apartment.
I had made a point of not looking back.
The drive out of the city was quiet, the kind of quiet that settles into you when you stop fighting it, and by the time the buildings thinned and the road opened up into open countryside I had both hands loose on the wheel and my phone face-down on the passenger seat. It had lit up twice since I left. Maybe more. I hadn't checked. Whatever was waiting in those messages could keep waiting, because I had made a decision and I was keeping it.
Two weeks.
That was all I had asked for. Two weeks away from my flat, from my office, from the careful, organised life I had built around myself like scaffolding, and I was not going to let anyone dismantle that before I even arrived.
The navigation dropped out about twenty minutes before I reached the turning, which should have stressed me more than it did. I slowed down, checked the directions I'd printed, actually printed, because I'm not entirely hopeless and found the small wooden sign exactly where the booking confirmation had said it would be.
Casa Valenti.
I almost missed it anyway.
The road narrowed the moment I turned off, asphalt giving way to gravel that crunched loudly beneath the tyres, forcing me to slow right down. Vines stretched out on either side in long, even rows, following the shape of the land, and there was nothing else, no other cars, no houses nearby, nothing that suggested the rest of the world existed at all. I wound down the window a little without thinking about it and breathed in cool air that smelled of soil and something faintly, unexpectedly sweet.
Then the road curved slightly and I saw the house.
It sat on a small rise, built from pale stone that had darkened with age in uneven patches, solid and unhurried and entirely without pretension. There was nothing decorative about it, nothing designed to charm a visitor at first glance, and somehow that made it more striking. It looked like it had always been there. Like the land had simply grown around it.
I parked the car and sat for a moment after I turned off the engine, listening to the silence.
Real silence. The kind that has weight to it.
Then I grabbed my bag from the back seat and got out.
The air hit me immediately, cooler than the city by several degrees, that sweetness stronger now, grounding. I stood there for a second with my bag over my shoulder, taking it in without really meaning to, before I started walking toward the house along the gravel path.
I was about halfway there when I stopped.
I couldn't have told you why, exactly. Not a sound. Not a movement I had clocked consciously. Just some shift in the air, some instinct that made me turn my head toward the rows of vines to my left.
He stepped out from between them.
Not quickly, not with any apparent awareness that he had just startled me — he simply appeared, unhurried, like he had been there all along and had only now decided to make himself visible. He was tall, wearing work clothes, sleeves pushed to the elbow, and he looked at me across the few metres between us with an expression that gave nothing away.
I didn't move.
Neither did he, for a moment. Then he started walking toward me with a calm, unhurried stride that somehow covered the ground faster than it should have, and stopped just in front of me.
Dark eyes. Direct. The kind of gaze that doesn't flinch away from you and doesn't apologise for that.
"I'm looking for Casa Valenti," I said, because I needed to say something.
"You're here."
His voice was low and even, and it did something odd to the air around us.
"I have a booking," I said. "The cottage."
"I know."
I held his gaze. "You know?"
"You're Sofia."
It wasn't a question, and something about the way he said my name, simply, flatly, like a fact, made me feel strangely wrong-footed.
"Yes," I said.
"From Milan."
"That's right."
He looked at me for a moment, unhurried, like he was placing me somewhere in his mind and taking his time about it.
"You left early."
"There's less traffic in the morning," I said.
"That's not why."
I let out a quiet breath, not quite a laugh, but close to it. "No," I admitted. "It's not."
Something shifted in his expression, barely perceptibly. Not warmth, exactly. Something stiller than that. Like he had decided something about me and was comfortable with the conclusion.
He turned toward the house. "Come."
I followed him, and I noticed that he didn't check whether I was behind him. He walked with the certainty of someone who is rarely wrong about these things.
We moved around the side of the main house and down a gentle slope toward a smaller building set apart from it, simple, clean, with the same pale stone and shuttered windows. Private. Exactly what I'd hoped for when I'd made the booking on a Tuesday night three weeks ago, sitting on my kitchen floor with a glass of wine and the quiet, overwhelming knowledge that I needed to get out.
He reached the door, unlocked it, and pushed it open.
I stepped closer and paused at the threshold, and when I glanced at him he was watching me with that same steady, unhurried attention.
"Is there anything I should know?" I asked.
He considered that for a moment. A genuine pause, not a polite one.
"This place is quiet," he said.
"That's why I came."
His gaze stayed on mine. "We'll see."
It lingered, that answer. In a way that a simple observation shouldn't linger.
I stepped inside. The air was cool and smelled of old wood and something herbal, and the room was simple and uncluttered and felt, bizarrely, like somewhere I might actually breathe.
I set my bag down and turned back.
He hadn't moved from the doorway.
"Thank you," I said.
"If you need something," he said, "you come to the house."
Not call. Not let me know. Come.
I noticed the difference.
"Alright."
He nodded once, then stepped back and walked away without waiting, his footsteps quiet on the gravel until they weren't there anymore.
I stood in the middle of the room and listened to the silence settle back around me.
Then I closed the door, slowly, and rested my hand flat against it for a moment before letting go.
For the first time since I'd left Milan, the distance felt real. Not just the kilometres. Everything. The distance between who I was three weeks ago, sitting on that kitchen floor, and whatever version of me had just driven here alone and stood in front of a stranger and admitted, without quite meaning to, that I had not left for the reasons I was telling people.
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
The quiet was absolute. Enough to hear my own breathing. Enough to feel, underneath the tiredness and the relief, a small, unruly thread of something else entirely.
I looked toward the closed door.
I had come here to be alone. I had planned it carefully, booked it deliberately, driven here with intention.
But whatever this place was — whatever he was — something told me that alone was not quite how this was going to go.
Part Two continues where this ends, available inside The Intimacy Files.
-Seraphine