know that she had enjoyed last night too—and she would thank him again for dinner. That was just good manners. No one could accuse her of being weird and desperate for just minding her manners.
The phone emitted a series of tones and then went dead in her hand.
Confused, Elise looked down at it. Had she entered the number wrong?
She tried again, gripping her phone tightly, but the result was the same. No ringing, just a few muted tones and then the call was terminated.
What was going on?
She looked from the phone’s screen to the note in her hand, comparing the numbers carefully. Hmm, she had definitely dialed correctly.
This isn’t his number.
The number Lucas had given her was wrong.
She felt numb and confused. Why would he have bothered to give her a wrong number? He hadn’t needed to do that. She had never asked him for a phone number. He could have left the apartment this morning and given her no phone number at all.
Was he just trying to be mean? To play a trick on me?
She didn’t think so. For one thing, if he was doing that, it was a stupid trick. It didn’t get him anything. He wasn’t even here to laugh at her looking foolish.
But more to the point, that just didn’t seem like something the man she had met would do.
She believed that Lucas had been his true self on their date. He was kind and caring and thoughtful. This was the guy who had rescued her purse from that thief. This was the guy she had spent last night with.
She didn’t know him well, it was true, but she had seen that he was caring and compassionate and generous. Not at all the kind of guy who would go around giving out fake numbers as a joke.
It must have been a mistake. That was all she could think. He had meant to leave her his number, but he had gotten a digit wrong or something.
Who gets their own phone number wrong?
Well, she had been pretty loopy when she’d gotten up this morning. Maybe he’d been feeling the same way.
She read through the note one more time, savoring the parts she could be sure about. He had enjoyed the night they’d spent together, and so had she. It had been one of the most remarkable nights of her life.
And he wanted her to enjoy the rest of her vacation. Well, that would certainly be no problem. She was only halfway through her trip, and there were a lot of things she was still looking forward to.
She would stop wandering aimlessly, she decided, and act with purpose. She would make the most of the rest of her time in Rome. She had been meaning to seek out the Pantheon. Maybe she would go looking for that today. And she would look for the farmer’s market she had stumbled upon her first morning here. She kept meaning to see if she could find it again.
It was a shame that she wouldn’t be able to see Lucas again. But that had always been a long shot. He lived in Boston. She lived in Albuquerque. The fact that they had met in Rome…it felt like their little fling was fated to burn short and bright. Once they went home, there was no reason for their paths to ever cross again.
She folded up the note, then carefully tore it into pieces and tossed it in the trash can. If she didn’t get rid of it, she knew, she would be tempted to keep revisiting it. She would obsess about that wrong number.
Better to let it go.
She dressed for the day in a sundress that she had been saving for a special day. Today was the day. It was the morning after her Roman fantasy.
This is the story I’ll tell everyone about my trip to Rome, she thought. She would be telling it for years, most likely. Someday, she would tell her children about the handsome man who had rescued her from being victimized by a thief when she had been traveling on her own.
Her parents would make a meal of the story. They would say that they had been right all along, that she should never have come to Rome by herself, that this would never have happened if she had been traveling with a friend.
Maybe she would leave out the part about having her purse snatched when she told them the story. She could just say that she had met Lucas