The Story of the Lost Child (The Neapolitan Novels, #4)

by Elena Ferrante

“Then why didn’t they publish it?” “Out of envy.” I burst out laughing. “The editors were envious of me?” “No, it was I who felt envy. I read your pages and threw them in the wastebasket. I couldn’t bear that you were so good.” For a few moments I said nothing. How important that article had been to me, how much I had suffered. I couldn’t believe it: was it possible that Professor Galiani’s favorite had been so envious of the lines of a middle-school student that he threw them away? I felt that Nino was waiting for my reaction, but I didn’t know how to place such a petty act within the radiant aura I had given him as a girl. The seconds passed and I tried, disoriented, to keep it close to me, so that it could not reinforce the bad reputation that, according to Adele, Nino had in Milan, or the invitation not to trust him that had come to me from Lila and Antonio. Then I shook myself, the positive side of that confession leaped to my eyes, and I embraced him. There was, in essence, no need for him to tell me that episode, it was a bad deed that was very distant in time. And yet he had just told me, and that need of his to be sincere, greater than any personal gain, even at the risk of putting himself in a terrible light, moved me. Suddenly, starting from that moment, I felt that I could always believe him.