And for the rest of the week, every time his cat walked past the laptop, the screen briefly flickered to show a confused horse and a man in a waistcoat, standing eternal in the rain.

Marco had three problems.

The image showed a man in a cheap velvet waistcoat holding a foam katana, standing in front of a very confused-looking horse.

Marco hesitated. Then he thought of Nonna’s sugo . He clicked .

Then his laptop crashed.

Second, his internet had chosen this exact apocalypse to drop to a crawl, buffering his video call with his boss into a slideshow of frozen grimaces.

When it rebooted, the file was gone. The website was gone. Even the bookmark he had saved had turned into a recipe for pickled eggplant.

But his phone buzzed. A text from Nonna.

First, it was raining in Milan. Not the romantic, cinematic drizzle tourists paid for, but a vengeful, horizontal downpour that had turned the afternoon sky the color of an old bruise.