KELFORD PRESS

SOMEWHERE Between Strangers  A Novel Kelford Press · 2026 Copyright © 2026\. All rights reserved\. Published by Windrose Books, London First Edition: March 2026 ISBN 978\-1\-91524\-087\-3 This is a work of fiction\. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination\. For everyone who ever fell in love in a city that wasn’t theirs, with a person who wasn’t planned\.  PART ONE __Florence__  “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page\.” — Saint Augustine # Chapter 1: The Girl with the Wrong Map Meera Iyer was lost\. Not metaphorically lost—though she was that too, in ways she had not yet begun to understand—but literally, prosaically, hopelessly lost in the tangle of medieval streets between the Duomo and the Arno\. The map on her phone had died twenty minutes ago, its battery sacrificed to three hours of compulsive photograph\-taking, and the paper map she’d picked up at the hostel’s front desk was, she now realized, oriented with south at the top, which was either a charming Italian eccentricity or a deliberate prank on tourists\. She suspected the latter\. It was September in Florence, and the air was thick with heat and the smell of stone and exhaust and something sweet that might have been jasmine or might have been someone’s perfume\. The streets were narrow here—barely wide enough for two people to pass without touching—and the buildings rose on either side like canyon walls, their shuttered windows giving nothing away\. She stopped at a corner and turned the map upside down\. Then sideways\. Then upside down again\. None of these orientations made the streets in front of her correspond to the streets on the paper\. “You look like you’re trying to read the map in four dimensions\.” The voice came from behind her—American, amused, male\. She turned and saw a man about her age leaning against the wall of a building, a camera bag slung over one shoulder and a gelato in his hand\. He was tall—taller than anyone she knew in Mumbai—with dark hair that needed cutting and eyes the color of the Arno in the late afternoon, a kind of grey\-green\-brown that couldn’t make up its mind\. “I’m not lost,” Meera said, in the tone of someone who is very lost\. He smiled\. It was a good smile—slow, asymmetric, slightly self\-deprecating\. “Of course not\. Where are you trying to not be lost on your way to?” “The Ponte Vecchio\.” He pointed with his gelato\. “Two blocks that way, then left at the leather shop with the green awning\. You’ll hear the river before you see it\.” “Thank you\.” She folded the useless map and shoved it into her bag\. Then, because she had been traveling alone for four days and had spoken to no one except hostel receptionists and waiters, and because his smile had been kind, and because Florence in September makes everyone a little braver than they usually are, she said: “Would you like to show me?” He looked at her for a moment\. Then he looked at his gelato, which was melting rapidly in the Tuscan heat\. Then he looked back at her\. “Yeah,” he said\. “I would\.” His name was Ethan James\. He was twenty\-nine years old, from Portland, Oregon, and he had been traveling alone through Europe for three weeks\. He was a photographer—freelance, which he explained was a polite word for “unemployed with a camera\.” He had come to Florence because he’d read somewhere that the light here in September was the best in the world for photography, and because he needed to be somewhere that wasn’t home\. He did not explain why he needed to be somewhere that wasn’t home\. Meera did not ask\. She understood that particular need too well to require an explanation\.  They walked to the Ponte Vecchio\. They stood on the bridge and watched the Arno turn gold in the setting sun\. They talked about nothing important—the heat, the tourists, the absurd prices of the leather goods in the shops that lined the bridge—and everything important—the feeling of being alone in a foreign city, the freedom and the terror of it, the way that traveling solo strips away all the roles you play at home and leaves you with nothing but yourself\. “I quit my job,” Meera said, surprising herself\. She hadn’t planned to tell him this\. She hadn’t planned to tell anyone\. “What kind of job?” “Software engineer\. At a very respectable company in Mumbai\. The kind of job that makes your parents weep with pride and your soul weep with boredom\.” He laughed\. “And the soul won?” “The soul won\. But it was a close contest\.” She paused\. “I also called off my engagement\.” He raised his eyebrows but said nothing\. He had that rare quality—rarer in men than in women, she had found—of knowing when to be silent\. “Arranged,” she added\. “Not by force—my parents aren’t like that\. By gentle, relentless, loving pressure\. The kind that’s hardest to resist because you know it comes from a good place\.” “What was wrong with the guy?” “Nothing\. That was the problem\. He was perfect—on paper\. Good family, good job, good teeth\. Liked cricket and cooking and called his mother every Sunday\. And I felt absolutely nothing when I looked at him\. Not dislike, not attraction, not even indifference\. Just… nothing\. Like looking at a well\-designed spreadsheet\.” Ethan nodded slowly\. “So you’re here\.” “So I’m here\.” They watched the last of the sun disappear behind the hills west of the city\. The sky turned from gold to amber to the deep, bruised purple that only Mediterranean skies can produce\. The lights on the bridge came on, one by one, and the water below became a mirror of scattered gold\. “Would you like to get dinner?” Ethan asked\. “I know a place\. Tiny trattoria, off the tourist track\. The pasta is…” He paused, searching for the word\. “Transcendent\.” Meera should have said no\. She was alone in a foreign city, and he was a stranger, and every safety lecture she had ever received—from her mother, from her friends, from the internet—told her that accepting dinner invitations from strange men on bridges was the first chapter of a cautionary tale\. But the evening was warm, and the bridge was beautiful, and his eyes were kind, and she was twenty\-seven years old and had just blown up her entire life, and if she couldn’t have dinner with a stranger in Florence, then what had been the point of any of it? “Transcendent pasta?” she said\. “How could I say no?”  # Chapter 2: The Trattoria “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are\.” — Jean Anthelme Brillat\-Savarin The trattoria was called Da Sergio, and it occupied a ground\-floor room on a street so narrow that the buildings on either side nearly touched above it\. There was no sign outside—just a wooden door, propped open, from which emerged the kind of aroma that makes you realize you’ve been hungry your entire life without knowing it\. The interior was small—eight tables, red\-checked cloths, candles in wine bottles, a chalkboard menu in Italian that Meera could not read and Ethan could only half\-decipher\. A large woman with grey hair and a flour\-dusted apron appeared, looked at them with the evaluating gaze of someone who has been sizing up customers for forty years, and led them to a table by the window without a word\. “She decides what you eat,” Ethan explained\. “You don’t order here\. Sergio’s wife—her name is Lucia—she looks at you and decides what you need\. It’s never wrong\.” “How did you find this place?” “I got lost\. Like you\.” He grinned\. “Getting lost is my primary research methodology\.” The food arrived in waves\. First, bruschetta with tomatoes so ripe they were almost liquid, on bread that had been rubbed with garlic and drenched in oil that tasted of grass and pepper\. Then a pasta—pappardelle with wild boar ragù—that was, Meera had to admit, genuinely transcendent\. The meat was dark and rich and falling apart, the sauce was dense with wine and herbs, and the pasta itself was thick and rough and clung to the sauce in a way that made every bite a complete experience\. “Okay,” she said, after the third forkful\. “You weren’t exaggerating\.” They drank red wine—a Chianti that Lucia had brought without being asked—and talked\. They talked about food: Meera described her mother’s biryani, which she claimed was the single greatest dish in human civilization, and Ethan described the fish tacos at a shack in Baja California that he said came close\. They talked about music: she loved Carnatic classical and secretly loved Taylor Swift; he loved jazz and not\-so\-secretly loved Bollywood soundtracks\. “Wait,” Meera said\. “You listen to Bollywood music?” “My roommate in college was from Hyderabad\. He played A\.R\. Rahman constantly\. I resisted for about a week, and then ‘Jai Ho’ got into my bloodstream and never left\.” She laughed—a real laugh, the kind she hadn’t produced in months\. It surprised her\. Laughter had become a foreign language since she’d called off the engagement and watched her mother’s face crumple like a paper lantern in rain\. They talked about travel\. Ethan had been to thirty\-two countries, mostly on assignment—he’d shot weddings in Bali, street markets in Marrakech, fishing villages in Portugal\. Meera had been to exactly three countries before this trip: India, Singapore \(for a work conference\), and Sri Lanka \(a family holiday when she was twelve\)\. This was her first solo trip, her first time in Europe, her first time doing anything entirely on her own\. “Are you scared?” he asked\. “Terrified,” she said\. “Every single day\. I wake up and for about three seconds I don’t know where I am, and then I remember, and the terror hits, and then—” She paused\. “And then?” “And then it turns into something else\. Something that feels like terror’s cousin\. The one who went to art school\.” “Exhilaration,” he said quietly\. “Yes\.” She looked at him across the table, across the candles and the wine and the remains of transcendent pasta\. “Exactly that\.”  They stayed at Da Sergio until Lucia began stacking chairs on the tables around them with the gentle but unmistakable determination of a woman who wanted to go to bed\. Ethan paid—Meera protested; he insisted; they compromised on splitting it, which in practice meant Meera paid for the wine and Ethan paid for everything else, which was not really a compromise at all, but she let it go because the night was warm and she was full of pasta and wine and a feeling she couldn’t name\. They walked back toward the hostel—they were staying at the same one, it turned out, the Ostello Gallo d’Oro on Via Cavour—through streets that were empty now, the tourists gone, the Florentines asleep or hiding behind their shuttered windows\. The city felt like it belonged to them\. The echo of their footsteps on the cobblestones was the only sound\. At the hostel door, they stopped\. “Thank you,” Meera said\. “For the directions\. And the pasta\. And the…” She waved her hand vaguely\. “The everything\.” “What are you doing tomorrow?” “I was going to the Uffizi\.” “Me too\.” She smiled\. “What a coincidence\.” “Astonishing\.” They looked at each other for a moment longer than was strictly necessary\. Then Meera said goodnight, and walked through the hostel door, and climbed the stairs to her dormitory room, and lay on her narrow bunk staring at the ceiling, and did not sleep for a very long time\. In the bunk below her, a German backpacker snored steadily\. In the bunk across the room, a Japanese girl murmured in her sleep\. And Meera lay awake, her heart beating faster than it had any right to, thinking about a man with camera\-colored eyes who had shown her the way to a bridge\.  # Chapter 3: The Uffizi, and After “Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth\.” — Pablo Picasso They spent the next three days together\. It was not a decision so much as a gravitational event—they were drawn together by a force that neither of them examined too closely, because examining it might have broken the spell\. At the Uffizi, Ethan taught her to see\. Not in the way that art history professors teach—with dates and movements and scholarly interpretations—but in the way that a photographer sees: the quality of light on a cheekbone, the geometry of a composition, the emotional weight of a color choice\. He stood behind her in front of Botticelli’s Primavera and said, very quietly, “Look at the way he uses the darkness behind the figures\. They’re not standing in a garden\. They’re standing in front of the void, and the flowers are their only protection\.” Meera looked\. And for the first time in her life, she saw a painting not as a beautiful object behind glass but as a message from one human being to another, sent across five centuries, still arriving, still urgent\. “You see things differently,” she told him\. “I see things for a living\. It’s the only thing I’m good at\.” “That’s not true\.” “What else am I good at?” “Gelato selection\. Map reading\. Making strangers feel less strange\.” He smiled\. That slow, asymmetric, devastating smile\. “You’re not a stranger, Meera\.” “We met forty\-eight hours ago\.” “Time is irrelevant\. Some people are strangers after twenty years\. Some people are family after twenty minutes\.” She wanted to argue, but she couldn’t, because she felt it too—the irrational, unearned, inexplicable familiarity of his presence\. She had known him for two days, and she could not remember what it had felt like not to know him\.  ## Three Days in Florence On the second day, they climbed to the Piazzale Michelangelo at sunset and watched the entire city turn to gold below them\. Ethan took photographs\. Meera sat on the stone balustrade and let the warm wind lift her hair and felt, for the first time in months, that she was exactly where she was supposed to be\. On the third day, it rained\. They sat in a café near the Palazzo Pitti and drank espresso and talked for four hours without pause\. She told him about her childhood in Mumbai—the flat in Andheri, the smell of her grandmother’s kitchen, the sound of the monsoon on the tin roofs\. He told her about Portland—the rain, the coffee, the mountains you could see on clear days, the mother who had raised him alone after his father left when he was seven\. “She died,” he said, very quietly\. “Six months ago\. Cancer\. That’s why I’m here\.” Meera reached across the table and took his hand\. She didn’t say “I’m sorry”—those words were too small for the weight of what he’d just told her\. She just held his hand, and let the silence speak, and felt his fingers tighten around hers like a