Someone bumped against her, and she jumped. The crowds had thinned out, and the New Yorker inside her no longer felt safe, so she headed down the Via dei Calzaiuoli to the Piazza della Signoria. As she walked, she told herself she’d made the right decision. Only a clean break from the familiar could clear her mind enough so that she could stop feeling as though all she wanted to do was cry. Finally she’d be able to move ahead.

She had a definite plan for how she would begin the process of reinventing her life. Solitude. Rest. Contemplation. Action. Four parts, just like the Four Cornerstones.

“Can’t you ever be impulsive?” Michael had once said. “Do you have to plan everything?”

A little over three months had passed since Michael had left her for another woman, but his voice poked into her consciousness so frequently she could hardly think anymore. Last month she’d caught a glimpse of him in Central Park with his arm around a badly dressed pregnant woman, and even from fifty feet away Isabel could hear the sound of their laughter, a little giddy, silly almost. In all their time together, he and Isabel had never once been silly. Isabel was afraid she’d forgotten how.

The Piazza della Signoria was as crowded as the rest of Florence. Tourists milled around the statues, while a pair of musicians strummed their guitars near Neptune’s Fountain. The forbidding Palazzo Vecchio, with its crenellated clock tower and medieval banners, loomed over the nighttime bustle just as it had been doing since the fourteenth century.

The leather pumps she’d paid three hundred dollars for last year were killing her, but going back to the hotel was too depressing. She spotted the beige and brown awnings of Rivoire, a café that had been mentioned in her guidebook, and made her way through a group of German tourists to find an outside table.

“Buona sera, signora…” The waiter was at least sixty, but that didn’t stop him from flirting with her as he took her wine order. She would have loved a risotto, but the prices were even higher than the calorie count. How many years had it been since she’d had to worry over menu prices?