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‘Will you stop talking and just do something? Make her go away! Or …’
Francesco looked at her, smiled and cleared his throat. ‘Come in, Valentina.’
Erin stared at him for a moment, transfixed in horror, before taking to her heels and fleeing to the bathroom. She stood there with her back against the wall, her heart hammering.
It was several moments before she had regained enough composure to actively eavesdrop on the low-voiced conversation going on in the other room and then it turned out to be mostly in Italian.
Just as she was about to give up on trying to figure out what they were saying she heard Francesco say in English ‘No, Erin doesn’t blame you at all.’
‘Well, I hope not. I really hope you two sort things out, Francesco. In my opinion Erin is the best thing that has ever happened to you. Just don’t rush things; give her time. You can’t just click your fingers and expect her to come running,’ she scolded.
Erin gave a mortified grimace at an image of the tumbled bedclothes in her mind. Click his fingers—he hadn’t even had to make that much effort!
‘Rafael would have liked her, don’t you think?’
Erin, picking up on the name she had never heard before, waited curiously to hear Francesco’s reply. It was a long time coming.
‘Rafe would have loved her.’
A few remarks in Italian followed. Erin listened with half an ear wondering about the odd note in Francesco’s voice.
She waited until she heard the door close behind Valentina before walking back into the room. Francesco was sitting on the bed.
‘Who is Rafe?’ she asked.
He gave a thin-lipped smile. ‘You heard that, then?’
‘It was hard not to.’
‘Rafe was my twin brother.’
She was totally stunned by the information. ‘You have a brother … a twin? Why didn’t you ever mention—?’
In a voice that was flat and totally expressionless he cut across her. ‘Had. Rafe died.’
Erin gulped and swallowed, her blue eyes softening with compassion as she went to sit beside him on the bed. ‘Oh, Francesco, I’m sorry. I had no idea.’
Though he didn’t respond directly, he picked his wallet up from the bedside table and, withdrawing a snapshot, handed it to her without comment.
The edges of the snapshot were creased and curled as though it had been fingered a lot, but the faces of the two young men in the photo were clear. Francesco was standing, his brother sitting. Francesco had his arm slung across the shoulders of his brother. They were both laughing.
‘You were identical twins!’
My God, it would be bad enough to lose a sibling, but she couldn’t even begin to imagine the horror of losing an identical twin.
‘Almost nobody could tell us apart.’
Erin was surprised to hear him say this. To her mind the differences between the two men were obvious. Francesco’s mouth was wider and firmer and his chin more squarely resolute. His brother’s features were probably more regular, and to her seemed softer and less aggressively masculine.
‘I’m sorry, I had no idea …’
When Francesco turned his head and looked at her the emptiness in his eyes frightened her. Her heart aching with empathy, she reached across and laid her hand over his.
‘We looked alike, but that was on the surface. We weren’t really alike at all.’ He took the photo from her fingers and looked at it. ‘Rafe was the imaginative, sensitive one. I’ll show you some of his paintings some time if you like. He was very talented.’
‘He was an artist?’
‘He did a lot of things; he was … restless. I think our parents thought that marriage would make him settle down.’ ‘He was married?’
