The rain softened. Sana lit a single candle. No one offered solutions. No one said, “It’ll get better.” They just reached out in the dark and held my hand. Then Priya’s. Then Maya’s. A human chain.

Summer isn’t a season. It’s a decision. And I’ve just made mine.

And when it was my turn, I said the thing I hadn’t told anyone. That I wasn’t sure I loved my job. That I felt like I was watching my own life from the outside, a passenger in a car I wasn’t driving.

The plan had been the Amalfi Coast. Instead, a last-minute flight cancellation and a collective stubbornness landed us in a rented Fiat Doblo with a temperamental AC and a boot full of prosecco. We drove south from Rome, not to the sea, but to a forgotten stretch of olive groves in Umbria.

We look like we’re twenty-two, not thirty-three. We look like the kind of women you see in a perfume advertisement for a scent called “Freedom” or “Now.”

Priya, ever the organizer, had a spreadsheet. Maya, ever the chaotic neutral, threw it into the pool on the first evening. I can still see the ink bleeding, the columns of “Beach Day” and “Winery Tour” dissolving into the chlorinated water.