‘I’d just started my final year at university. I had to drop out. But I was studying history so my degree wouldn’t have been of much use to me even if I had graduated.’
Dulcie frowned. But that would mean…
‘So, you were running the estate when we got married.’
‘Yes. No. Sort of. Edo had decided he wanted to take over the running of the estate, so I took a few weeks off. To be honest, I was relieved. I was supposed to be this custodian, safekeeping everything for future generations, only I didn’t know what I was doing, and then I met you, and it felt like everything was falling into place. I could walk away. Live the life I wanted. With you.’ He leaned forward and rested his arms against the balustrade.
‘But then we split up, and Edo was killed, and I had no choice. I had to go back.’
Dulcie frowned. No choice? Had to?
As if sensing her confusion, Ettore met her gaze, his forehead creasing. ‘I love the castle. I love the history of it, and that it’s a living, breathing, working estate. And I love my family, but I never wanted to be the heir. I was never meant to be.’
‘So why did you stay? Why not let Stefano keep running it?’
‘I couldn’t leave. Not after Edo died.’
She remembered Ettore’s face when Edoardo had given her the bracelet. ‘You went back for your mother. She needed you.’
Ettore leaned more heavily against the balustrade, his gaze fixed on the lights fanning out from the centre of the city, his heart thudding against his ribs.
Below him, Paris stretched out into the distance. It had been here so long, surely there was nothing it hadn’t seen or heard.
‘My mother thought I had died. When she realised it was Edo, she told me that the wrong son had been taken.’
Finally, he had said it out loud. And it felt so momentous that he half expected the lights to snap off or cracks to appear beneath his feet. But instead, everything stayed as it was. Except that Dulcie’s hand was now wrapped around his. He felt her fingers tighten.
Chapter Nine
DULCIE FELT HERheart thud painfully as she replayed each of his words.
‘I don’t understand.’
She glanced over to where Ettore was staring across the city as if the breathtaking tapestry of light and shadow might somehow be able to help her make sense of his simple, devastating statement.
‘It’s not very complicated. My brother was her favourite,’ he said, and the matter-of-fact tone of his voice was one of the most painful things she had ever heard. ‘She adored him. He was everything to her.’
But even if that was true, she couldn’t imagine anyone saying those words out loud.
‘Maybe…’ She faltered, not lost for words but robbed of them, brutally. Her own mother had been neglectful and erratic. She was also an addict, an alcoholic, so she said things that she regretted but nothing like that, and she’d loved both Dulcie and Oscar equally.
But Ettore’s mother had been grieving, Dulcie told herself, trying somehow to rationalise the duchess’s behaviour. She had been in pain, and shock, and she had been hurting.
‘When did she say that to you?’
‘She came to the hospital with my father.’
Her head was spinning. Did he mean after the accident? But Ettore was injured. He’d been concussed and broken his arm. She had seen the scars on his body from where he’d been dragged by the bike.
‘They were away in Portofino visiting friends when the accident happened. Valentina called them but they were out for dinner, and it was noisy, and I suppose they got the wrong end of the stick. I was in bed when they arrived, doped up on painkillers but I don’t think I’ll ever forget her face when she saw me.’
He breathed out unsteadily. ‘She looked devastated. And then she walked up to my bed, and she told me that I should have died, not Edo. She never spoke to me again.’
Dulcie felt sick, actually sick as if she might throw up.
‘She was in shock. She didn’t mean it.’ She couldn’t have meant it. It was so callous, so cruel.
‘Sometimes I think that. But she loved him so much. And she didn’t love me in the same way.’ The bruise in his voice made her breath feel jagged in her throat. ‘She blamed me for what happened. And I was to blame.’
