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She had lingered over strong espresso in a café near her hotel after she woke, putting off the inevitable for as long as she could. With every bone in her body, every fiber of her being, she had not wanted to make the last leg of this journey. She had not wanted to travel the last few hours into the countryside, further and further into the past. Further and further into everything she’d wanted so badly and lost despite herself.
It seemed impossible that any of this was really happening. It reminded her of the dreams she’d had on and off since leaving Italy three years ago. She would dream that she had never left at all, that she had only imagined it, that she was still trying to bite her tongue and keep her feelings to herself like the dutiful principessa she had failed to become and that the hard, lonely years since leaving Leo had been the dream.
She had always woken in a panic, her face wet with tears, the bedroom seeming to echo around her as if she had screamed out in her sleep.
There was no waking up from this, Bethany thought now, feeling flushed, too hot with emotions she refused to examine. She stared at the ivy-covered wall before her as if it could help her—as if anything could.
She climbed out of the car and couldn’t help the deep breath she took then, almost against her will. The air was crisp, clean, and sweet-smelling. She fancied she could smell the Italian sun as it headed west high above her; she could see the Alps in the far distance, the vines and the olive groves. She could smell cheerful local meals spicing the early-evening air: rich polenta and creamy, decadent risotto, the mellow undertone of warming olive oil on the breeze.
It brought back too many memories. It hurt.
She was unable to keep herself from a brooding look up at the castello itself. It sat there, the high walls seeming to be part of the cliff itself, feudal and imposing, crouched over the town like a dragon guarding its treasure. She could easily imagine generations of Di Marcos fighting off sieges, bolstering their wealth and influence from the safety of those towering heights. She almost imagined she could see Leo, like some feudal lord high on the walls, the world at his feet.
Bethany almost wished she could hate the place, for on some level she blamed the stones themselves for destroying her marriage. It was a visceral feeling, all guts and irrationality, but the girl who had walked inside those walls had never walked out again.
She wished she could hate the thick, stone walls, the now-unused battlements. She wished she could hate the drawbridge that led through the outer walls of what had originally been a monastery, over the defunct moat and beneath the Di Marco coat of arms that had first been emblazoned above the entryway in the fifteenth century.
“It is so beautiful!” she had breathed, overcome as she’d walked through the great stone archway at the top of the drawbridge. He had swept her into his arms, spinning them both around in a circle until they had both laughed with the sheer joy of it right there in the grand hall.
“Not so beautiful as you,” he had said, his gaze serious, though his mouth had curved into a smile she’d been able to feel inside her own chest. “Never so beautiful as you, amore mio.”
Shaking the memory off, annoyed by her own melancholy, Bethany pulled her suitcase from the passenger seat and headed toward the entrance of the pensione. She had chosen this place deliberately: it was brand new. There would be much less chance of an awkward run-in with anyone she might have known three years ago.
She was reasonably confident she could avoid Leo as easily.
“It should not require more than two weeks of your time,” Leo had estimated with a careless shrug. Two weeks, perhaps a bit more. She had survived the last three years, she’d thought, so what were a few more weeks?
But she couldn’t help the feelings that dragged at her, pulling her inexorably toward that vast cavern of loneliness and pain inside that she could not allow to claim her any longer.
Just as she couldn’t help one last, doubtful look at the castello over her shoulder as she pushed open the door to the lobby and walked inside.
“I am so sorry,” the man said from behind the counter in heavily accented English. “The room—it is not yet ready.”
But Bethany knew the truth. She could see it in the man’s averted gaze, the welcoming smile that had dropped from his lips. It had happened the moment she’d said her name. It did not seem to matter that she’d used her maiden name, as she’d grown used to doing in Toronto.
Her hands tightened around the handle of her suitcase, so hard her knuckles whitened, but she managed to curve her lips into an approximation of a polite smile.
“How odd,” she murmured past the tightness in her throat. “I was certain the check-in time was three o’clock, and it is already past five.”
