Cassidy watched him warily. Driving in Sicily had shocked her at first: Sicilians drove like possessed demons, passing at high speeds, flipping her off if she didn’t react fast enough, and cutting her off in roundabouts. And the transportation department didn’t exactly take great care of the roads, either. On her second day, after a rainstorm, a giant pothole appeared out of nowhere on the road she had driven just hours earlier. At other times, she would round a bend to find a section of pavement washed out. No sign, no warning. It reminded her of the roads on Helens, only in Sicily you were expected to drive at race-car speeds.
“Take a left up there,” he said.
“Okay,” Cassidy said as a tingle of anxiety wormed through her gut. “Though if we end up on one of your adventures I may never forgive you.” She had learned that Pete never passed up an opportunity to explore the “what if.” At least they had a full tank of gas.
“You love my adventures,” Pete replied.
She shot him a look, then turned onto a side street lined with tall eucalyptus trees, their wintergreen-colored boughs swaying in the breeze. The road followed a small river, the banks dotted with jettisoned garbage. Up ahead, a junction split the road in two directions. To the left, the road paralleled a rusty barbed wire fence and a meadow of tall grass broken only by smooth eucalyptus trees, and to the right, a shaded, cracked road followed the water.
“Try right,” Pete suggested.
Again, Cassidy glanced at him. “Do you even know where we’re going?”
“Sort of.” From the glove box, he had produced a map and unfolded it.
Cassidy looked back to the road and braked suddenly. There was a woman standing in the middle of the lane. Pete looked up.
The woman’s ebony-black skin gleamed in a patch of sunlight. A scrap of fabric—a hankie, perhaps, waved in her hand. If not for her bright red lingerie attire, Cassidy would have assumed the woman was in trouble.
She quickly realized that the woman was in trouble, only a different kind. As soon as Cassidy slowed the car, two more women popped out of the weeds. They too were dressed only in skimpy lingerie, their lean bodies glistening. One of the women held an umbrella over her head and flagged at them with her fingers.
“What the . . . ” Pete said.
Cassidy swerved around them, and as the women realized that they weren’t going to stop, they quit waving and flagging. Immediately, their gaze returned to the road junction, as if to anticipate the next car.
“Stop,” Pete said.
“What?” Cassidy glanced at him in alarm.
“I want to talk to them.”
“Why?” Cassidy glanced in her rearview mirror. “You know what they are, right?”
Pete nodded.
“I haven’t seen them before, but I’ve heard about them,” Cassidy said, feeling uneasy. “They call them ‘umbrella girls.’”
Pete turned around in his seat, his face bearing an intense look she recognized. “Can we go back?”
Cassidy pulled the car over. “You’re serious?”
“Where do they come from?”
“Nigeria, I think.”
Pete’s eyes filled with anguish. “I just want to talk to them.” He met her worried gaze. “Please.”
With growing trepidation, Cassidy turned the car around. By the time she returned to the area, another car had pulled over. A man was following the woman in the red lingerie down the bank of the river. Cassidy grimaced.
“What if they don’t want to talk to you?” she said.
“I’ll pay them.”
“What?” Cassidy cried.
“Not like that,” he said, stepping out of the car.
Cassidy watched him cross the road. The middle woman flashed him a warm smile, her bright white teeth lighting up the shaded roadway.
Cassidy saw the woman shake her head and step away, her smile gone. Pete followed, and she couldn’t catch his words, but in his hands was a folded bill. He offered it to the woman. She shook her head again and stepped into the trees. Pete followed, and ducked out of sight.
Cassidy bit her lip and searched the shadows and swaying grasses until Pete stepped back onto the road. Behind him, the woman watched him go until her eyes connected with Cassidy’s and she looked away.
Pete jumped back in to the car.
“She wouldn’t tell me anything,” he said. “She acted tough, but I could tell she was scared.”
“How do they get here?” Cassidy asked, remembering the woman’s haunting gaze.
“I don’t know,” Pete replied.
Cassidy felt a warm flush of gratitude as she sat around the table, drinking Sicilian wine with her colleagues from the Etna project.
Plates piled high with pasta arrived and Dr. Max Di Angelo stood. “First, a toast, to us!” he said in his accented English, raising his glass.
“Saluti,” Cassidy said with the others. Next to her, Pete’s voice joined in.
The waiters filled every surface with plates and the group pounced on the food. Pete had insisted he and Cassidy share the classic carbonara and the meatballs and both tasted amazing. By the time the meal wound down, Pete had interviewed everyone at the table about their research, their future goals, their frustrations with government restrictions or lack of funding—his usual. Thankfully, nobody seemed to mind the attention.
After strolling back to the apartment, Cassidy packed her bag and prepared for bed while Pete lingered on the couch with his weather-beaten notebook. She wandered over, stretching her shoulders in an attempt to loosen one of her many knots earned on Etna’s slopes.
“There’s an awful lot of scribbling going on in here,” she said, rubbing his shoulders.
Pete paused his writing. “Ahh,” he said, relaxing beneath her touch. “You’re hired.”
“Anything you’d like to share?” she asked as her fingers kneaded his muscles.
He pulled her arms down so their cheeks touched. He tucked the pencil inside the notebook and tossed it onto the coffee table. “It’s just some stuff I learned from Max,” he said with a sigh.
She settled in next to him on the couch. Pete pulled Cassidy’s legs over his.
“Did he tell you about his theory that Etna is more like a hot springs
