Twenty-two years ago as I saw Venice and Florence and Rome for the first time, I clutched my Eurail pass and followed my wanderlust as far as my lira would take me.

Three years ago, my husband and I watched our kids frolic in the afternoon sunshine as we savored red wine and hors’ devours on the deck of our rented Tuscan villa, less than an hour from the now infamous Perugia.

Like probably every single girl who ever studied abroad, I’ve followed the Amanda Knox case with curiosity, horror, and a small ache in the pit of my belly. 

The case is a mess of confusion and accusation and no real answers.  I’ve never been sure—how can I be—about what happened that night.  And I don’t know enough about the Italian justice system to know whether “innocent until proven guilty” is a thing by which they also abide. I held my breath yesterday as I watched the verdict live, hoping for her freedom, because the evidence just doesn’t seem to be there, and hoping beyond hope she deserves it. The outcome is terrible either way.  If she’s innocent, as the courts held yesterday, the murder is a horrible tragedy for Meredith Kercher and an abhorrent miscarriage of justice for Amanda Knox who lost four years of her live in a cell she never should have entered.  If, God help her, she was involved in this gruesomeness, it’s a horror that will never end.

But that ache in the pit of my belly?  It’s not for Amanda.   And it’s not there because of some sophomoric idea that, “There, but for the grace…”  I’ve got hindsight and age on my side:  it’s fairly easy to look back and know that although my study-abroad crowd had fun, we didn’t run wild—or much at all, really—with locals. 

No, that ache exists for the sake of my children, for my boys who I want to experience adventure and travel and life in the wide, wide world.  The boys who I know aren’t perfect, no more than I was or am, and who will make their share of mistakes and missteps as they find their way.  Of course I can’t imagine any of them involved in a tragedy like this—to even suggest such a thing makes me queasy.  But this case squares its shoulders and stares at me, and other parents who love to travel, and forces us to ask:  should we let them go when we can’t go with them? 

I think we have to.  And in the meantime, my fingers are crossed and my prayers are lifted that the seedy underside of life never calls my kids’ names, that what they learn about heroin and meth they’ll learn the same way I did:  from books like Nic Sheff’s Tweak and his father’s Beautiful Boy.  When I read their words, tears rolled down my face as I sobbed and grasped at every reason this could not happen to my own beautiful boys.  I feel the same way when I watch Amanda Knox.

The ache is for my children.