“Whispers of the Orange Tree”

The first time Emma saw Luca, it was under the orange tree that stood stubbornly in the courtyard of the old art school in Florence. It was 2009, and both of them were twenty-one, young, impatient, and trying to understand the world—and themselves—through art. Luca was in a sculpture program; Emma was studying painting, her hands always smelling faintly of turpentine and oranges.

They met by accident, literally, when Luca backed into Emma while carrying a half-finished bust of Michelangelo. The sculpture hit the pavement and shattered into three clean pieces. Emma gasped, and Luca, flustered, looked up into her face. It was the kind of glance that, in fiction, would change the course of a story. But this was real life. All it changed, at first, was the trajectory of their week.

“I’m sorry,” he said in Italian.

“I’m not,” she replied in clumsy Italian, her smile hesitant but honest. “It looked a bit... serious.”

He laughed, and that was the beginning.

For the next two months, they ate lunch under that tree. They talked about art, music, heartbreak, childhoods. Emma told him about her small-town life in Devon, England, and how she’d left behind a stable career in nursing to chase a dream she didn’t yet understand. Luca told her about his mother’s vineyard in Tuscany and how he hated the idea of returning home to run it. He dreamed of exhibitions in New York, of stone and steel and fire.

There was something raw and unplanned about their time together—like wet paint refusing to dry.

One warm evening in May, after a student gallery showing, they kissed under that same tree. It was soft and unsure, like their future. But it felt inevitable.

They spent the rest of that summer inseparable—train rides to the coast, sketchbooks filled with each other’s portraits, lazy days in cafes filled with cigarette smoke and arguments about impressionism. She painted him once, sitting with his head in his hands, sun slicing across his back like gold ribbons. He called it The Weight of Becoming.

But love, like art, is often disrupted by reality.

In late August, Emma’s father passed away suddenly. She flew home to England, promising to return in a week. But grief does not keep to schedules. One week became three, then five. Calls became texts, then silence. Her mother needed her. Her brother was unraveling. Her paints dried in their tins. And Luca, not hearing from her for nearly two months, eventually let go.

Five years passed.

Emma became an art therapist in London. She dated, painted, and built a life she could live with, even if it wasn’t the one she once imagined. She still thought of Luca sometimes—especially when she smelled oranges or walked past stone sculptures in the V&A. But she told herself that kind of love—young, unscripted—was meant to end.

In 2017, she took a trip to Florence. It was her first time back.

She hadn’t planned to go near the old school, but one rainy morning, curiosity pulled her there. It had changed—new windows, a digital sign—but the orange tree still stood, roots deep, branches defiant. She walked toward it like a memory pulling her forward.

And there he was. Luca.

Older. Broader. A hint of silver in his dark hair. He was sketching a boy sitting nearby, completely focused.

She hesitated, unsure if he would remember, or care.

But then he looked up. And smiled.

“I hoped you'd come back one day,” he said softly.

She laughed, almost in disbelief. “You... waited?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “But I never sat here without thinking of you.”

They went for coffee. And then dinner. And then a walk through the old neighborhoods, where shutters clattered in the breeze and musicians played beneath crumbling arches. Their conversation picked up as if no years had passed, only days.

Luca had stayed in Florence, teaching part-time and working on commissions. He’d had a serious relationship, but it ended a year ago. “I was never fully in it,” he admitted. “Something about you always stayed.”

Emma cried that night—not out of sadness, but from the strange beauty of rediscovery.

Today, they live between Florence and London. Emma paints again—more freely now—and Luca recently opened a small gallery, where they host exhibitions for young artists. There’s a tiny apartment above the gallery, where an orange tree grows in a clay pot by the window. It’s not as grand as the one in the courtyard, but the scent is the same.

Sometimes, on quiet evenings, Emma will ask Luca if he ever wonders what might have happened if she hadn’t come back.

He always answers the same way:

“Love, like good art, waits for its moment. We just needed time for the canvas to dry.”