I turn to see who she’s looking at.

At first glance I think he’s your typical Italian guy leering at us American girls, midtwenties maybe, olive-skinned, dark eyes, wavy brown hair that’s carefully styled, wearing a simple white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to below the elbow, and khaki pants, shiny leather shoes. Cute, I think. He’s staring at us with a hint of a smile.

I get this weird, unsettled feeling, a tingling along my spine.

I turn back to Angela. She’s gazing out the window where there is nothing to see but the dark tunnel we’re moving through. She pushes a strand of hair behind her ear, then returns her hands to her lap, where she starts twisting the ring on her index finger around and around, a nervous habit I’ve never noticed in her before.

I take another look at the guy. He meets my eyes, his smile widening, his eyes knowing, almost laughing.

“Ange . . . ,” I say, turning back to her. “Who is—”

Then it hits me. This must be Angela’s secret Italian boyfriend.

Aha. I’ve been wondering if he was going to turn up. I even made a dumb joke about it when we first landed in Rome, like, So where’s Mystery Boy? and Angela gave me a look that would have withered flowers, so I dropped it. I tried asking her about it last week, and that time she acted like she’d had a string of boyfriends in Italy, no special one. But now here he is, in the flesh, and Angela is trying so hard to hide that she is totally freaking out.

“Oh,” I say, stifling a smile, relieved that’s it’s nothing dangerous. “I see.”

She leans forward and grabs me by the wrist. Hard.

“Don’t read me,” she mutters under her breath. But touching me only makes it easier to pick up what she’s feeling. I see a flash of this guy in her mind’s eye, a memory, a close-up of his face, his eyes, which are a beautiful chocolate brown, his breath warm against her cheek as he steps closer, looks from her eyes to her lips.

I jerk my hand from Angela’s. A voice overhead announces the next stop, and the train begins to slow. We’re still two stops away from ours, but Angela jumps up.

“Let’s get off,” she says loudly. “It stinks in here.”

I don’t argue. The train stops and the doors hiss open. I follow her out, and even though she’s trying to act all casual, I don’t miss the I-could-care-less-about-you look she casts the Italian guy’s way. And I don’t miss the way he nods back at her, still smiling.

Like he’s calling her bluff.

ANGELA

My mother always says that love is like a snakebite, a venom slowly spreading through your veins. She’s never told me about her own romantic life, the husband she had in those years before I was born, the man who broke her heart by dying. It’s hard to imagine my mother in love. All that’s left now is the kind of passion she feels for church or her work running the Garter or sometimes for me, when I wear something low-cut or put on lipstick that’s too red. She’ll take one look at me and drag me off by the arm to her bedroom, where there’s a portrait of Jesus on the wall. She’ll sit me down on a little wicker stool next to the bed. And she’ll talk about love as a snakebite. As something dangerous. As something bad.

“You must guard your heart,” she always says.

What’s weird about it (besides the fact that Jesus in this painting has blue eyes and straight golden hair—I mean, come on) is that I think she really means my heart. Like, she’s not saying the word heart as another word for virginity. She’s not talking about lust, although that’s bad too, of course. She’s talking about love.

My mother is afraid that I’m going to fall in love.

“Guard your heart, Angela,” she says, and I nod and tell her I’ll be good. There are no boys in my life. No hottie who’s caught my eye. No chance at love.

“I’m too busy for boys,” I say, and she says, “Good,” and pats my hand and looks at Jesus like the three of us—me, Mom, and Jesus—are a happy little family, and we’ve just finished up a family discussion.

Good talk. Problem solved. None of that pesky falling-in-love business.

But I wonder, is all this antilove talk because of my father, because of who that makes me? Does she think that I should avoid love because deep down, there’s something dark inside of me? Something not worthy of love?

She’s told me the story three times, with less detail every time I’ve asked. She was walking, at night, in Rome. Her husband had died a few months earlier, of cancer, and she was distraught. She was staying with her mother, surrounded by the chattering crowd of the Zerbino family. It was doing her good, she said, being part of our loud, boisterous family, eating good food every day, being reminded of life. But that night, she’d wanted quiet. She’d wanted to be alone. She went to mass at San Marco, and the angel followed her home. She woke up to his dark shape standing over her bed. Paralyzed. Unable to scream.

“Did he say anything?” I asked her one of those times, but she shook her head, turned away, her fingers clutching at the small golden crucifix she’s worn around her neck for as long as I can remember. She left me with the image of his shadow looming over her. His black wings cutting off the light.

My conception was not an act of love. To her, I was a curse.

She came back to the States and hid herself away, hid her growing belly, her shame. She cut herself off from her family and her friends. People thought she was grieving for her dead husband, and she was, but she was also grieving for herself. Part of her had died that night, she told me. But then one morning a different kind of angel came to her—a golden man, she called him—who told her that I was not a curse, but a blessing. I would be a remarkable child, born of angels and men. A shining child, he said. A miracle.

That’s when she got the idea to call me Angela, and sometime after that she decided to love me.

And maybe that’s the snakebite she talks about. Maybe her love for me was that slowly spreading stuff in her blood, like I was a disease that infected her. She didn’t want to love me, but she did. She couldn’t help it. Still, it doesn’t explain why she insists that I stay away from love, like she knows something about me that I don’t.

“Guard your heart,” is all she says.

I don’t tell her that I fell in love two years ago. Truly, madly, deeply—isn’t that how the song goes?—I fell in love. That’s what I don’t have the guts to say out loud.