The keyhole on the Aventine Hill offered the most perfect view in Rome—a miniature St. Peter's Basilica framed by manicured hedges like a painting hung in an emerald gallery. Clara Murphy had read about it in three different guidebooks, but none had mentioned the small leather journal wedged into the ancient lock itself.

She tugged it free, wincing as the movement sent fresh pain across her criminally sunburnt shoulders. Twenty-four hours in Rome and she'd already managed to fall asleep on the Spanish Steps like a tourist cliché. The journal was soft with age, its pages swollen from humidity and years of handling. A name was embossed on the cover: *Matteo Rossi*.

"That's mine." The voice came from behind her, low and startled.

Clara turned to find a man in his late twenties, dark curls falling across his forehead, expression caught between relief and something that looked like dread. He wore linen pants and a half-unbuttoned shirt that suggested he dressed for Rome's heat with the ease of someone who'd never known anything else.

"You left your journal in a keyhole," Clara said, holding it out. "That's either very poetic or very careless."

He didn't smile. "I put it there on purpose. I was hiding it."

"In a tourist attraction?"

"In plain sight. Sometimes that's the best place." He took the journal from her hands, his fingers brushing hers. "Matteo. And you've got an Australian accent, so you're very far from home."

"Clara. And you're deflecting." She crossed her arms, immediately regretting it as her shoulders screamed protest. "Why hide a journal?"

Matteo studied her for a long moment, weighing something she couldn't name. Then he opened the journal to a random page—a hand-drawn map of Trastevere with notes scrawled in Italian and English. "I'm a tour guide. This contains every secret place I've discovered in Rome. Routes tourists never take. Gardens no one remembers exist. It's my... insurance policy."

"Insurance for what?"

His jaw tightened. "For disappearing."

Clara waited, sensing the weight of confession in the air between them.

"My family arranged a marriage," Matteo continued quietly. "Very traditional. Very binding. The wedding is in two weeks. This journal—these places—they're my escape route. Different spots where I've hidden money, contacts who can help me leave. The last page has the final plan."

"Let me guess," Clara said. "You're having second thoughts about the disappearing act."

"I was. Until you pulled it from the keyhole. I'd convinced myself it was a sign—that maybe I should just go through with the wedding, forget about being selfish." He looked at her directly now, something desperate in his dark eyes. "But you found it. Maybe that's the real sign."

Clara should have walked away. She had two weeks in Rome, a carefully curated itinerary, and absolutely no business getting involved in a stranger's complicated life. But she'd left Melbourne specifically to escape her own safe, predictable existence—the accounting job, the boyfriend who wanted her to settle down, the feeling that she was slowly fossilizing.

"Show me," she heard herself say. "The places in your journal."

Matteo's expression shifted, surprise melting into something warm. "Why would you want that?"

"Because I'm sunburnt, alone, and my guidebook recommendations have been mediocre at best." She grinned. "And because you clearly need to figure out what you actually want, and sometimes talking to a stranger helps."

They started in Trastevere, following Matteo's penciled maps through lemon-scented piazzas where old women hung laundry between buildings like flags of domestic surrender. He showed her a bakery hidden behind a carpenter's workshop, where the owner spoke only in dialect and the cornetti melted on your tongue. He explained that he'd been leading tours for five years, ever since dropping out of law school—a decision his family had never forgiven.

"They see the marriage as redemption," Matteo said as they climbed a narrow stairwell frescoed with fading saints. "Francesca comes from a good family. Her father has connections. They think it'll settle me, make me serious."

"And Francesca?" Clara asked, pausing to catch her breath. "What does she think?"

"She thinks it's her duty. We've known each other since childhood. She's kind, dutiful. She'll be a good wife to someone." He pushed open a door Clara hadn't noticed, revealing a rooftop garden wild with rosemary and thyme. "Just not to me."

The garden was spectacular—a secret wilderness in the heart of ancient Rome. Matteo had a camping chair hidden behind a crumbling chimney, a bottle of wine wrapped in a towel to keep cool.

"This is one of your hiding spots?" Clara asked.

"One of many. I've been planning this for months." He poured them wine in paper cups. "I have everything ready. New identity, money, a job lined up in Barcelona teaching English. I just need to decide if I'm brave enough or selfish enough to actually do it."

Clara sipped the wine, tasting summer and wild herbs. "Tell me about the last page of the journal. The one you mentioned."

Matteo's hand stilled on his cup. "How did you know that was important?"

"Because you keep not showing it to me."

He retrieved the journal, opening to the final entry. The page was different from the others—no maps, just a date and a single address in neat handwriting. Tomorrow's date.

"It's the meeting point," Matteo explained. "A driver who'll take me to Naples, then a boat. After tomorrow, the window closes. The wedding preparations make it impossible after that."

"And you still don't know if you'll show up."

"No." He looked at her, and Clara saw the war in him—duty against desire, family against freedom. "I keep thinking about all the places I'll never see if I stay. Patagonia. Kyoto. The Northern Lights. I became a tour guide because I loved showing people Rome, but it was supposed to be temporary. I was supposed to leave years ago."

Clara understood that feeling in her bones—the slow suffocation of staying too long in a place that no longer fit. "And what do you keep thinking about when you imagine leaving?"

Matteo was quiet for a long moment. "My sister's children. Sunday dinners. The way my mother's face will look when she realizes I'm gone." He turned to Clara. "What made you leave Australia?"

"I was disappearing anyway," Clara said. "Just slower. Becoming someone I didn't recognize. At least leaving was active—a choice rather than an accident."

They stayed in the garden until the sun set, painting Rome in shades of amber and rose. Matteo told her about the other places in his journal—a bookshop that served coffee in the stacks, a fountain where locals still collected drinking water, the cemetery where Keats was buried and wild cats ruled like Egyptian gods.

"Show me tomorrow," Clara said. "All of them. Your last day of the life you've been planning to leave."

Something flickered in Matteo's expression—hope or fear or both. "And then what?"

"Then you decide."

They spent the next day following the journal's maps through Rome's hidden heart. Matteo introduced her to a street artist who painted only in chalk so his work would disappear with the rain. They found the clandestine garden—even more secret than the rooftop—where monks had cultivated medicinal herbs for centuries. In a frescoed stairwell that spiraled through a forgotten palazzo, Matteo kissed her, desperate and searching, tasting like wine and wild thyme.

"I can't ask you to stay," he whispered against her mouth.

"You're not," Clara said. "I'm asking you."

They made love in his small apartment near Campo de' Fiori, windows open to the night sounds of Rome—scooters and laughter and someone singing opera badly but enthusiastically. Afterward, Matteo traced the lines of her sunburn with gentle fingers.

"I have to tell you something," he said. "About the marriage."

Clara felt her stomach drop. "What?"

"It's not arranged. Not really." He sat up, running his hands through his hair. "I mean, our families expect it. But Francesca and I—we agreed to it. She wants stability, I wanted to please my parents. We're friends who made a practical choice. But I told everyone it was arranged because..." He trailed off, shame coloring his voice.

"Because it gave you an out," Clara finished. "A reason to run that wasn't just about you being scared."

"Yes." He looked at her, eyes dark with guilt. "The journal, the hiding spots, the dramatic escape plan—it's all real. But the reason I've been hiding it isn't just from my family. It's from myself. Evidence that I want more than I'm brave enough to reach for."

Clara absorbed this, understanding shifting through her. "And Francesca? Does she know you're planning to run?"

"She suggested it." Matteo laughed bitterly. "Two months ago, she told me she could see I was miserable. That we should both find the courage to want something real instead of something safe. She said she'd cover for me if I left—tell everyone I got cold feet, take the blame herself."

"She sounds brave."

"She is. Braver than me."

Clara took his face in her hands. "Matteo. What do you want? Not what's dutiful or dramatic or makes a good story. What do you actually want?"

He looked at her for a long time, and she saw him sorting through years of fear and fantasy, obligation and longing. "I want to stay in Rome," he finally said. "I love this city. I love showing it to people, finding new secrets in streets I've walked a thousand times. I don't want to run away." He took a shaky breath. "I want to cancel the wedding. Face my family. Disappoint them and survive it. And I want to see where this goes with you, even though you're leaving in two weeks and it's probably insane."

"Completely insane," Clara agreed, kissing him. "I'm in."

The next morning, they met Francesca at a café near the Pantheon. She was elegant and self-possessed, with kind eyes that assessed Clara quickly and found her acceptable.

"So you're the girl who found the journal," Francesca said, smiling. "Matteo called me last night. Sounded terrified."

"I was," Matteo admitted. "I'm still terrified."

"Good." Francesca squeezed his hand across the table. "Fear means you're doing something real. I'm proud of you."

They called off the wedding that afternoon—together, facing their families with Francesca's steady courage and Matteo's newfound honesty. It was difficult and painful and liberating. Matteo's mother cried, his father raged, but underneath the disappointment Clara sensed something like relief—that Matteo had finally stopped hiding.

Clara extended her stay in Rome by three months. She found work at a hostel in exchange for a room, and spent her days exploring the city with Matteo, following maps they drew together in a new journal. They kissed in fountains and argued about the best gelato and made love in gardens where the herbs grew wild.

On her last night before returning to Australia—not forever, just to pack up her old life properly—they climbed to the Aventine Hill. The keyhole was empty now, holding only the view it was meant to frame.

"I could come with you," Matteo said. "See Australia. Meet your family."

"You could," Clara agreed. "But not yet. First you need to stay here and be brave in the place you've been hiding."

"And then?"

"Then we'll see." She kissed him, tasting possibility. "I'm not disappearing, Matteo. I'm just choosing to leave temporarily instead of accidentally."

He smiled, understanding. "I'll be here. Finding new secrets. Waiting to show you everything I discover."

Clara flew home knowing she'd return—not to hide in someone else's city, but to build something real with someone who'd finally stopped running. The journal stayed with Matteo, but its last page had been rewritten: not an escape route, but a beginning. A date circled three months hence, and an address they'd chosen together—not for vanishing, but for coming home.

Rome waited, patient and eternal, full of hidden gardens and secret stairwells and all the wild, frightening beauty of choosing to stay.