When the waiter left, she centered the salt and pepper shakers on the tablecloth, then moved the ashtray to the edge. Michael had looked so happy with his new wife.

“You’re too much,” he’d said. “Too much of everything.” So why did she feel as if she were too little?

She drank the first glass of wine more quickly than she should have and ordered another. Her parents’ long-term love affair with personal excess had made her wary of alcohol, but she was in a strange country, and the emptiness that had been growing inside her for months had become unbearable.

“It’s not my problem, Isabel. It’s yours…”

She’d promised herself she wouldn’t brood about this again tonight, but she couldn’t seem to get past it.

“You need to control everything. Maybe that’s why you don’t like sex that much.”

That was so unfair. She liked sex. She’d even started toying with the idea of taking a lover to prove it, but she recoiled from the idea of sex outside a committed relationship. It was another legacy from watching her parents’ mistakes.

She wiped away the smear her lipstick left on her wineglass. Sex was a partnership, but Michael seemed to have forgotten that. If he hadn’t been satisfied, he should have discussed it with her.

Her thoughts were making her even more unhappy than she’d been when she entered the piazza, so she finished her second glass of wine and ordered another. One night of excess would hardly turn her into an alcoholic.

At the next table two women smoked, gestured, and rolled their eyes over the absurdity of life. A group of American students just behind them gorged on pizza and gelato, while an older couple gazed at each other over thimble-size aperitifs.