As Sam and I continued to date and then got engaged, I got over the thought of Alyssa. But then Sam disappeared, and I found out that he went straight to her for help when he did so. I later learned his reasons. But still. But still. I hadn’t gotten over that.

Clearly, Sam hadn’t, either, because there she was. There she was positively glowing at him again as she peeked from behind his bedroom door.

If my insides had been slightly twisted with guilt over the fact that I’d spent the night with Theo, my stomach filled with bile now. It’s one thing to learn your ex is dating someone else. It’s another thing to find out that “someone else” is the girl you always had the bad, bad feeling about.

And it was a whole other bag of cherries to see them post-romp.

“Hi, Alyssa,” I said.

“Hi.” There was no triumph in her voice. “I’ll give you guys some time.”

She pulled her head back inside the room. Click went the door of Sam’s bedroom, then click again, because it had to be pushed twice to keep it closed. The fact that Alyssa knew that slayed me. Tears sprang to my eyes as I stood there looking at my fantastic, adorable, beloved ex-fiancé, who had clearly moved on with his life.

“I thought she lived in Indianapolis,” I said.

“She moved here a few weeks ago.”

“To be with you.”

“No, to work at Rush Medical Center. She’s in geriatric-”

I cut him off. “I remember.” Alyssa was a researcher in the geriatric field, working to improve the quality of life for the elderly, particularly those who were bedridden. She was, essentially, an angel of mercy. Which, I’d always said, made it pretty tough to compete with her as an ex-girlfriend. Or maybe she wasn’t the ex anymore. It appeared she was the girlfriend now, and I was the former.

The energy I’d had in my apartment crashed, replaced by a sorrow so deep I took a few steps to the couch and sank into it, putting my face in my hands.

“I’m sorry, Iz.” He sat next to me and put his arm around me.

I didn’t think there could be anything worse than finding Alyssa in Sam’s apartment, but this-this-was worse. Sam awkwardly patting me on the shoulder, trying to comfort me, sure, but making it somehow clear in his stiff body language that his body didn’t belong to me anymore, nor, apparently, did his heart.

And what of my heart?

I thought of Q, my former assistant. Q had just entered the gay world when we’d met, and as such, he took any and all breakups hard.

One day we were discussing his latest, and he had asked me when my heart had last gotten broken.

“Never,” I’d told him. And it was true.

The guys I’d dated before Sam-Timmy, my boyfriend in college, and Blake, the one I dated during law school-had been such insignificant relationships compared to the one I had with Sam. I was the one who broke up with Timmy-his love of beer bongs got old after freshman year. And Blake and I were on again-off again and had finally decided to part when we couldn’t find time to get together with our busy law school schedules and also found we really didn’t care. And when Sam and I split, well…How to explain it? I guess I never saw it officially as a split. Even when he disappeared and even after that, when he said he needed to move on, I didn’t really expect him to move on. I assumed that Sam and Izzy, Izzy and Sam was still an option that hung in both our horizons.

Now I felt the heat of his skin as he sat next to me. I breathed in that Sam smell. Both of these things had brought tears to my eyes in the past, and this time was no different. And yet those tears definitely were different. They weren’t the sweet tears that glitter from your eyes when a deep connection makes you so happy, so filled with joy. No, those were tears I’d never felt before-hot, almost burning tears that must have come from the skin that protected my heart, the skin that felt sliced now, carved deep.

“I’m sorry,” Sam said again. He turned and gave me a half hug, and the self-consciousness of it cut me even deeper.

“It’s okay.” I stood, wiping tears. They splashed on my cheeks and chin. They felt as if they were leaving marks, burning me. “I have to go.” My voice sounded like someone else’s. And as I looked at Sam, my eyes clouded, making him look different, too. “I’ll talk to you later.” My voice sounded strangled.

“God, Iz.” He started crying now. He stood, grabbed me fiercely, wrapped his arms around me in a way that felt so Sam, so us. We stood together, a tight mass, quietly choking out sobs.

I heard a persistent bleat, bleat, bleat, bleat. Mayburn honking from outside.

“I have to go.”

He nodded, sniffed, stared into my eyes. And that stare said it all. It said, Goodbye.

“Ciao, ciao,” the porter said to me, as I left.

I waved at him, went out into the courtyard and walked a pathway lined with stone busts.

My first day in Rome, and I felt as if I was in the middle of one big flashback.

When I had arrived at O’Hare yesterday, my flight wasn’t leaving for a few hours. Using one of the public computer kiosks, I got on the Internet and searched for hotels in Rome. The rates were astronomical. Since Mayburn picked up my flight, I was willing to take on some credit card debt (something I’d never done before), but if I stayed a week in the Roman hotels, even the modest ones, I’d have to live in a cardboard box under Lower Wacker when I returned.

I kept thinking about the summer I’d spent in Rome years ago. It was during that time that my friendship with Maggie solidified into sisterhood. Maggie and I immersed ourselves in Roma, in our fellow students, our professors, the tenets of international and comparative law, and it was as if a happy bubble had sprung up around us. Of course, there were the usual traveler’s woes-blisters adorning our feet, having to wash your underwear in a dorm sink-but I loved every bit.

As I remembered that time, a thought occurred to me. I found the Web site for Loyola’s Rome campus. It was in Monte Mario, a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city with upscale apartments and a few piazzas full of shops.

I scrolled through the Web site. And there, on the bottom of the Housing page, it said, Alumni: Rent a Room! Low Occupancy in the Summer Means We Welcome Visitors! I scrolled to find the cost-less than half of what the hotels were charging. I could put up with dorm-style living in order to save money and to be, once again, in Rome, where I could escape Dez Romano and where Elena couldn’t escape the questions about my father.

The campus was set on a long, narrow, grassy plot of land, the main building a three-story unassuming brick affair. But if the architecture and the setting were somewhat unremarkable, the feel of the place-the energy-wasn’t. Rome is a seen-it-all kind of place. No matter how much the Italians delight in things-food and wine and sex, to name a few-the fact remains that their cultural DNA includes a world weariness of it all. And yet the American students who studied at Loyola were visiting Italy, and sometimes Europe, for the first time. They were wide-eyed, eager to see, to learn, to live. And so the campus with its otherwise sleepy appearance hummed with that energy. It vibrated at a low level but with a certain light that colored everything a pretty ochre, that made the place soothing and yet made it sing.

Thank God, because dorm living and me really weren’t made for each other. But I let the energy of the place take me, happily, to the showers that scalded in such a familiar way and then turned suddenly freezing, to the teeny bed that was really just a cot with sheets that felt like paper towels. I slept a dreamless sleep-a godsend-and in the morning, I left my dorm room and strolled past the campus’s stone busts. I pushed through the tall metal door set into the high brick wall and walked onto the street.