The Winter Project

47. Isabel

After her last conversation with Minoru, Isabel decided that it was time for her to take action. Everything she had learned from him in the last few weeks, and from Steven and his stories of his life with Julia had given her a new mindset. She was of course prone to her natural way of thinking that she had been practicing over the years, but for the first time in her life she was determined to think differently.

She wanted to remind herself regularly of Steven, as he talked so often about his regrets of not holding his wife enough and not doing more of the things that they so often talked about but never got around to doing. She wanted to know that when she died she wouldn't die with regrets. She hoped that Julia, on her deathbed, had not dreamt of owning a hotel in Italy with her husband and wished she had done it sooner. Equally, Isabel did not want to have any dreams that wouldn't become a reality before the day that she died. She made a list of everything she ever wanted to do and she reluctantly shared it with Minoru one evening as they watched the sun go down on the lake, both sat on one of the boats with a bottle of white wine and two boxes of her favourite gnocchi. She had felt embarrassed at first, but Minoru showed no sign that it was a list to be embarrassed of and had read it intently as if he was trying to memorise it. He went through each item on the list and told her that every single one of them was doable, and easy.

He promised her that they would complete every item on the list and that they would do it together, especially the last one, which he said was imperative that they completed it together. Her stomach churned with nerves. As she looked at his face, lit up with the glow of the evening sun, she became aware so suddenly that she was in love with him. She had not even given it a second thought since meeting him, but now she was hit with love at the same velocity that she would have been hit by the train that nearly killed her six months previously. She thanked herself for being stupid enough to cross a train track in the pitch black. She thanked herself for developing safety behaviours to coddle her anxiety such as playing music loudly to drown out her surroundings, and she thanked every aspect of her life that had driven her to that moment, for those parts of her life had driven her to be sat on the lake at sunset with a man who was single-handedly changing her entire world. Before she had time to thank anything else, he leaned over and kissed her.

She had not been kissed in years, and had forgotten how it felt to be kissed. She froze, unable to remember what to do. He placed his hands on her hips to balance himself and she held his face in her hands before softly kissing him back. Before she had time to think about what to do next, he stumbled. She grabbed his jacket as hard as she could but it was too late; he had grabbed the edge of the boat for stability with too much force, causing the boat to rock and he subsequently fell overboard head first.

Her first instinct was to laugh, but as his head resurfaced and she saw the panic in his eyes, she remembered that he couldn't swim. She grabbed his hand and instructed him on how to climb back into the boat as she held the sides to keep it from rocking back and forth. When he was safely back in the boat, his clothes drenched in water and the wine bottle nowhere to be seen, they laughed until it hurt and he kissed her again, appearing completely unfazed by how cold or frightened he was.

As Minoru's time in Lake Garda came to an end, so did Isabel's. They spent every day together pushing the boundaries of her comfort zone as they tried to tick the simpler items from her list, but it was not a time of pain or struggle. It was a time of relief and of exploration, self-development and education. She laughed in situations she would once have refused to enter into. She smiled in places she once feared even the thought of. They borrowed Steven's car and Minoru drove them down the Strada della Forra, a road Isabel had previously described as 'one of her worst nightmares.' He did not tell her about seeing Cleo on the road, and was relieved when he drove past the opening that he had seen her at and did not see any police signs or other signs of a recent tragic event.