The Road Between Sorrento and Almost

The Fiat is red. Of course, it is red. She had not asked for red, she had taken the keys the man at the rental desk slid across the counter and walked out into the Sorrento morning, and the car waiting for her was the color of a dare.

She has been driving the costiera for twenty minutes, and she already understands why people lose their minds on this road. It does not behave like a road. It behaves like a rumor; narrow and winding and dropping away on one side into a sea so blue it seems invented, climbing on the other into rock and bougainvillea and the white walls of villages that appear and vanish before she can name them.

She is alone. She has a loose plan: Positano, perhaps Amalfi itself, lunch somewhere she hasn't chosen yet. Nothing is fixed. This is the point. For three days, she has been staying inland, in quiet hills, at an agriturismo with a cat that sleeps on the step, and this morning she woke up and decided she wanted the sea.

She rounds a curve, and the Alfa Romeo appears behind her like a provocation.

It is silver. Low and confident, and clearly not interested in the pace she has been keeping. She watches it in her mirror—close, not aggressive, just present, and something in her tightens pleasantly. She does not speed up. Not yet. She simply becomes more deliberate, taking her line through the next curve a little more precisely, aware of being watched.

At the next pullout, she eases over, generously, and he passes.

He glances across as he goes. She catches it. A half-smile, easy and unhurried, the smile of someone who has driven this road before and is glad to find company on it. Then he is going around the next bend, and she is looking at the space where the Alfa was.

She pulls back onto the road.

She drives faster.

She catches him at the next promontory where the road widens to let a tour bus breathe, and she goes past with her chin up and her window down, and she does not look over. And then looks over. He is already laughing. She laughs too, alone in the red Fiat, surprised by herself, and accelerates into the next curve.

This is what the road does. It makes you anonymous and therefore free. Nobody knows her on this coastline. Nobody knows she is careful, considered, the one who thinks before she acts. On this road, she is just a woman in a red car who has decided, for no reason she can name, to race a silver Alfa Romeo along the most beautiful stretch of tarmac in the world.

They leapfrog for twenty minutes. He is faster on the straights, those brief, impossible straights where the road flattens for a breath before curving again. She is bolder at the pullouts, sliding back into traffic with less hesitation than she would ordinarily allow herself. Each time they pass, there is the glance, the grin, the small shared acknowledgment that something delightful and entirely unplanned is happening on this Tuesday morning in June.

She feels exhilarated. She is reckless. She is, for exactly this stretch of road, someone she rather likes.

Then she comes around a long curve and sees the Alfa pulled into a scenic

overlook ahead. Properly stopped. Engine off.

The door is open.

He is standing beside the car, leaning against it in the unhurried way of someone who has time and knows it. More or less her age, she thinks, taking in the dark hair, the easy posture, the sunglasses pushed up. Italian in every particular. He is looking back down the road. Looking for her.

She has perhaps three seconds.

Her foot lifts off the accelerator.

Her stomach sinks. Her foot returns to the accelerator.

She drives past.

She does not look over. Her eyes look over anyway. He has turned, watching the Fiat go, and there is something in his expression she cannot fully read at this speed and will spend the rest of the day trying to. Surprise, perhaps. Amusement. Something quieter underneath, though she may be inventing that.

The overlook disappears behind the next curve, and she is alone again with the sea and the road and the heavy thumping in her chest.

The Fiat feels different now. Still red. Still hers. But the recklessness has shifted into something that sits between relief and loss and will not quite resolve itself into either.

Her eyes go to the rearview mirror. The overlook is still just visible, a pale wedge of road in the distance. The Alfa is still there. She watches it shrink and actually slows, giving time to her silent hope.

He does not follow.

She faces forward. A small, flat disappointment settles like the crash after a sugar high. She had the nerve for the road. For the game of it, the speed, the anonymous thrill of two strangers making something out of nothing on a Tuesday morning. What she did not have, when it came to it, was the nerve to stop.

She is still thinking about this when Positano happens.

Without warning, there it is: tumbling down its cliff in layers of pink and white

and terracotta, a sudden explosion of color and light. The sea glitters below it in the morning sun, the whole impossible thing so extravagantly beautiful that she sucks in her breath. The Alfa, the overlook, the almost of it, all of it dissolves.

There is only this. The town, the light, the sea.

She parks and walks to a cafe with a view of the water. It doesn't take long for her caffè to arrive, and she sits with her face tipped toward the sun. The morning spreads out ahead of her, unhurried and entirely hers. She has plans. Good ones. Lunch somewhere, a walk down to the beach, perhaps a boat if she feels like it.

She picks up her cup.

Somewhere on the road above, a silver Alfa Romeo is driving away.

What if?