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chapter 79
alex
It feels as if I’ve been punched in the throat. Suddenly it’s hard to breathe.
Marc set me up.
He’sthe reason Elena Martini was on the beach that day.
He’s known where Lottie was all along.
Marc was never my boyfriend, of course, but that’s what Luca always called him:Your boyfriend’s on the phone. Off to have dinner with your boyfriend?
‘Marc knows you are alive?’
‘No, he doesn’t know. It was a lucky coincidence. I’d resigned myself to never seeing Lottie again, but then he contacted my mother a few months after I “died” and they arranged it between them. He thought he was sending Lottie to her grandmother.’
Somehow Marc’s treachery is the worst of all. Luca is Lottie’s father; however deluded he is, he does at least have some claim to her. He didn’t play the role of devoted friend, campaigning and fundraising to find a child whose whereabouts he already knew. He didn’t hold my hand and comfort me as I sobbed my heartbreak to him, knowing he could alleviate my grief and misery in a moment.
‘Why?’ I say.
‘Why d’you think?’
I suddenly remember the last time I saw Marc:After all I’ve done for you.
He didn’t mean what he’d done tohelpme.
He meant what he’d done towinme.
I want to vomit. Did he think with Lottie out of the way I’d have time for him? Or perhaps it’s even darker: he wanted me to suffer, believing,in extremis, I’d turn to him.
And for a while, at least, he was right.
Marc’s the one who broke into my house, I realise. He wanted to see how close we were getting. How near to the truth.
He must’ve stolen that photo of my sister and me eating ice-creams on the lawn at South Weald House to distract me – unless there’s a more sinister reason he wanted a picture of me as a child. My stomach curdles when I think that I let him tuck Lottie into bed.
‘I’m tired. I need to sit down,’ Luca says, abruptly.
He crosses the courtyard towards the shade of the loggia, his movements those of a much older man. His left foot drags slightly and, when he sits down, he does so carefully, positioning a cushion in the small of his back.
I feel an unexpected pang of loss. Luca might not have died three years ago in Genoa, but the young, handsome, vibrant man I knew did vanish that day. I don’t recognise the thin, haunted stranger who’s taken his place.
‘Where is she?’ I demand. ‘Is she here?’
‘She’s with her family.’
‘I’m hermother!’
His beautiful eyes suddenly blaze with anger. ‘You have no right to call yourself that! You were fucking a stranger when you should’ve been looking after her! If my mother hadn’t rescued her, who knows what could have happened!’
I want to slam his head against the stone wall behind him. For two years, I’ve been tormented by visions ofwhat could have happened: my daughter chained in a cellar, passed around among depraved men, rotting in a makeshift grave.
Luca could have spared me that agony with a single text.
It takes a huge effort to swallow my rage. But the only thing that matters now is giving Quinn enough time to get my daughter safely away from this man and his insane mother.
I crouch down before him. ‘Luca, I know I wasn’t the perfect mother,’ I say, my tone conciliatory. ‘But I’ve loved the very bones of our girl, since the moment she was born.’ My voice cracks. ‘When she was taken from me, it was like my heart had been ripped out while it was still beating. I may not have been a natural mother or even a good one. But Iamher mother, Luca. And she needs me.’
