Roads We Learned to Love On

The first time Lina Everhart saw Matteo Riva again, he was arguing with a vending machine in the Gare de Lyon station as if it had personally betrayed him.

Paris was doing what it did best in late autumn: making everything look like it had been written in a letter that never got sent. The light was soft and grey. The air smelled like roasted chestnuts, espresso, and rain that had not yet decided whether to fall.

Lina stood with her suitcase handle clenched in her fist, the wheels of her bag angled toward platform nineteen, where her train to Milan had already been delayed twice. She told herself she was only watching because she had nothing else to do. Because she was tired. Because it was safer to focus on someone else’s ridiculousness than on the fact that she was running away from a life she had almost—almost—settled into.

The vending machine refused to give Matteo his coffee.

He struck the side once, then leaned in, speaking to it in Italian as if it might respond with shame. When he turned his head to check whether anyone had witnessed the humiliation, his eyes landed on Lina.

For one second, his face went blank—like someone had switched off the present and left only the past.

Then his mouth curved, not quite a smile. Something cautious. Something surprised.

“Lina?” he said, like the name had been lodged under his tongue for years.

Lina felt her heart do the smallest, most infuriating thing: it remembered.

She should have walked away. Paris was full of strangers. It would be easy to disappear into the crowd, to be a woman with a suitcase and no unfinished business.

Instead, she heard herself say, “Matteo.”

Her voice was steady. Her hands were not.

He stepped toward her, coffee abandoned. The crowd flowed between them: tourists clutching maps, commuters with sharp shoulders and sharper schedules. But Matteo moved like he had always moved—like the world made space, whether it wanted to or not.

He looked different.

Older, yes, but not in the gentle way Lina had imagined when she sometimes let herself wonder—only for a second, only in the quiet hours—what he might look like now. His hair was longer, curling at the collar of his coat. His jaw held a shadow of stubble. There was a thin scar near his eyebrow she didn’t remember.

But his eyes were the same: warm and restless, as if he was always halfway down a road, even when standing still.

He stopped a polite distance away. Not too close. Not a stranger. Not an intimacy. A compromise.

“What are you doing in Paris?” he asked.

Lina could have said a thousand things. The truth was tangled: she had quit her job in Berlin, left her engagement behind like a coat she didn’t want to carry anymore, and bought a one-way ticket toward a city she used to dream about with him.

But truth was heavy, and Lina had been travelling light.

“I’m passing through,” she said. “You?”

Matteo gestured toward the platform behind him. “Same. I’m supposed to meet someone here. We’re driving to Italy.”

Driving.

The word cut across Lina’s chest with a strange familiarity. Matteo had always loved roads more than destinations. He used to say the best part of a journey was the stretch where you didn’t belong anywhere yet.

Lina’s train announcement crackled overhead again: delayed due to technical issues.

She should have felt relief. Instead, she felt trapped between time zones of her own making.

Matteo glanced at the departure board. “Milan?” he asked, noticing her ticket tucked into her passport. “You’re going to Milan.”

“Yes.”

He studied her face, careful, as if the years between them were glass and he didn’t want to press too hard.

“Didn’t you… didn’t you move to Berlin?”

“I did,” Lina said. “I lived there for three years.”

“And now?”

Now I am leaving everything I thought I wanted, Lina almost said. Now I don’t know who I am without the version of myself that tried to be reasonable.

Instead, she shrugged. “Now I’m going to Milan.”

Matteo nodded slowly, like he understood the kind of answer that was also an evasion.

He shoved his hands into his coat pockets. “If your train keeps delaying, you could come with us.”

Lina blinked. “With you?”

Matteo lifted one shoulder. “Yes. It’s a long drive. France, Switzerland, then down through the Alps. We’ll be in Milan by tomorrow afternoon, probably.”

Lina’s lungs tightened. A road trip across Europe with Matteo Riva—her first love, her almost, the person she had once thought was the only place she could ever belong.

It was ridiculous. It was impossible.

It was exactly the kind of thing Lina had spent years refusing to do.

“I can’t,” she said quickly. “I— I don’t even know where you’re going.”

“Milan, for a start,” Matteo said, eyes flicking to her suitcase again. “And then further south. But we can drop you off.”

“We?” Lina repeated.

Matteo’s mouth quirked. “My friend. He’s meeting me. It’s his car.”

Lina should have been relieved there was a third person involved, a buffer. Instead, she felt something else—something like disappointment that she couldn’t name.

The station swelled with sound: rolling luggage, laughter, shoes on tile. Lina’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She ignored it.

“What’s in Milan?” Matteo asked softly.

A future I’m not sure I want. A family dinner I promised. A ring sitting in a drawer in Berlin. A man who loved me in a steady way that never made me tremble, and who deserved a woman who didn’t keep thinking of trains and roads and Matteo Riva.

“Work,” Lina lied.

Matteo’s eyes narrowed slightly, not accusatory—just curious. “You always hated lying.”

Lina’s throat tightened. “You always hated staying.”

Matteo’s expression changed, like someone had turned a key in him. He looked away briefly, jaw tense, and Lina hated herself for bringing it up. She’d promised she wouldn’t carry bitterness into whatever came next. But bitterness was a kind of loyalty too, sometimes.

“I didn’t come to Paris to start this,” he said quietly.

“I didn’t come to Paris to see you.”

He looked back at her then, and for the first time, his eyes held something openly vulnerable.

“Still,” he said. “Here we are.”

The departure board flashed again. Another delay. Lina felt the air shift inside her body—the quiet, dangerous sensation of a door opening.

She imagined herself on the train: alone, watching French countryside blur past, arriving in Milan tired and unchanged.

Then she imagined herself in a car, crossing borders, passing through mountains, forced to look Matteo Riva in the eyes and remember what she had once been brave enough to want.

Her rational mind begged her to choose the train.

But Lina had not come this far to keep choosing rational.

“Where is your friend?” she asked, surprising herself.

Matteo’s face softened, the cautious smile returning. “He’s late. As usual.”

Lina exhaled slowly. “If I do this—if I get in the car—then we don’t pretend it’s nothing.”

Matteo’s eyebrows lifted. “Nothing?”

“We don’t pretend we’re strangers,” Lina said. “We don’t pretend it didn’t matter.”

Matteo looked at her for a long moment, and Lina could see the internal debate: the part of him that wanted to protect himself, and the part that had always been reckless where she was concerned.

“I can’t pretend that,” he said finally.

Something in Lina’s chest loosened painfully. “Fine.”

Matteo’s phone rang. He answered in Italian. Lina caught only fragments: apologies, traffic, where are you, hurry up.

When he hung up, he looked at Lina with an expression that was almost boyish in its anticipation.

“He’s five minutes away,” Matteo said. “If you’re coming, we should go soon.”

Lina nodded, then stopped, a sudden thought catching her. “Matteo… why are you driving to Italy?”

His gaze flicked down, then up again. “A wedding.”

Lina’s stomach dropped. “Yours?”

He barked a short laugh, the sound sharp with disbelief. “No.”

Then, quieter: “My sister’s.”

Lina blinked. Matteo had always been close with his sister. She remembered photos on his phone, the way he talked about her like she was a lighthouse.

“Is she happy?” Lina asked.

Matteo’s face softened. “Yes. Very.”

“And you?”

The question slipped out before Lina could stop it.

Matteo’s eyes held hers. The station noise seemed to recede, as if the world understood this was a moment that mattered.

“I’m… trying,” he said.

Lina nodded slowly. Trying. She knew that word. It was what you said when you couldn’t admit you were still broken.

A sleek dark car rolled up outside the station, hazard lights blinking. Matteo gestured.

“That’s us.”

Lina hesitated, fingers tightening around her suitcase handle.

Matteo watched her like he would accept any choice, even if it hurt him. That was new. In the past, he had always demanded she leap without question. Maybe he had learned. Maybe pain had trained him into patience.

Lina inhaled.

Then she walked.

Outside, the air was colder, sharper. Paris wind carried the smell of wet asphalt. The driver’s side window rolled down, and a man leaned out—mid-thirties, light brown hair, amused eyes.

“Matteo,” he called, accent French-Italian. “You always pick the worst stations.”

Matteo leaned down to the window. “Shut up, Luc.”

Luc’s gaze slid to Lina. He straightened slightly, curiosity warming his face.

“And who is this?”

Matteo paused, just a fraction of a second.

“Lina,” he said. “An old friend.”

Something tightened in Lina at the phrase. Old friend. A label that fit badly, like a borrowed coat.

Luc smiled politely. “Bonjour, Lina. We’re going to Italy. Are you coming too?”

Lina opened the back door, slid her suitcase in, and climbed into the seat. The interior smelled faintly of leather and peppermint.

“Yes,” Lina said, voice steady now. “I’m coming.”

Matteo got into the passenger seat. He didn’t look back at her immediately.

But when the car pulled away from the station and merged into Paris traffic, he glanced over his shoulder.

Their eyes met.

No smile. No apology. Just recognition.

And Lina felt it—unmistakable—as the city slid behind them:

They weren’t just driving toward Italy.

They were driving toward the part of their story that neither of them had ever finished.