Only then she wasn’t laughing, she was crying.
But he was gone. Just like those hailstones in Paris. Her dreams of love had melted away, but she would not let it define her life or her brother’s.
If she told herself that often enough, surely it would come true. Wouldn’t it?
As the car pulled slowly to a halt, Ettore stared up at the familiar crenellated outline of the Castiglione Fiana. He had half considered staying on in Paris indefinitely. But he couldn’t keep hiding from the truth for ever. Couldn’t hide the truth from his family for ever either.
And now he was here, he felt something like relief.
But then, things had changed. He had changed.
Dulcie had changed him. Throughout his childhood, his parents’ open favouritism for his siblings had left him feeling rootless and superfluous in his own family. He had made himself useful, leaning into his natural affinity for order amid chaos.
But it had stifled him. His life had narrowed in ways he didn’t want but felt powerless to change. Because his value, his only value to his family, lay in what he could do for them, not in who he was or wanted to be.
And then there was Dulcie with her blue, dancing eyes and her sweet smiles and her courage and he’d been forced to face their past. To see that he had put conditions on their love in the same way his family made their love conditional. Acknowledging that had given him the courage to change his life.
To put down the survivors’ guilt that he’d carried since his brother’s death.
To grieve for Edo and know that his grief wasn’t tainted somehow.
Dulcie’s words had been a restorative balm to his mother’s angry outburst. She had been like a nurse plant brought in to care for the vines.
It was why he saw the estate differently too now. For the first time in what felt like a very long time, he didn’t see the raw-edged, big-skied land that had belonged in his family for centuries as a burden to be carried or a privilege that required a drip-feed of sacrifice.
Now it was his living and his home, and he had fallen in love with it all over again.
As he had fallen in love with Dulcie all over again.
And her reward?
He had lied to her. He had told her that there were no secrets between them. But there were. And when she’d found out the truth, he had lost her.
And now he was losing his mind.
After Dulcie fled the hotel, he waited in Paris. Hoping, praying she would return. Leaving the hotel at dawn, he retraced his steps through the city, even returning to the hotel they had stayed in when they first met.
And then Valentina called him and said that his father had been taken ill and was asking for him and he had a choice that was not a choice. Just like the one he had forced Dulcie to make when Oscar turned up in London two years ago.
His chest ached for the pain he had caused her. And then his pain had intensified two hours ago when he’d realised that Dulcie had paid back every penny she owed him and, finally, he was forced to accept that she had fled to England. And that for the second time in his life, their marriage was over.
‘Ettore.’
His father was sitting up in bed with an oxygen tank on the floor beside him. He looked pale and small and relieved. Not at all like his father.
‘Papà.’
Leaning in, he kissed his father’s papery cheek. ‘How are you feeling? Valentina said you were struggling to breathe. She had to call the doctor.’
‘I’m fine.’ His father waved his hand dismissively.
‘Is that what the doctor said?’
‘Oh, I only let him come and see me to keep Valentina from calling an ambulance and the fire brigade. Sit, sit.’ He patted the bed. ‘It’s ghoulish. Keep calling the doctor every two minutes. I sent him away. Dying men should be left to die with dignity. Or better still a magnum of champagne.’
‘You’re not dying right now, Papà. And sending the doctor away is not helpful.’
‘And you want to help me, do you?’
