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It took more than ten minutes but less than two hours, and there would be no need to speak with his legal team.
The sun seemed so vivid, the bay so blue, and as he climbed the stairs all was right in the world.
Or about to be.
‘Alicia!’
He called her name and was met with silence.
‘Alicia?’
He met absence. The actualfeelof real absence.
She had gone for a walk, Dante decided, or shopping. Yet he knew he lied to himself, only without the skill of Alicia, because he didn’t believe it himself.
‘Alicia!’ he called a third time, even though he knew it was pointless, for her clothes were gone and the open doors meant not even the linger of her perfume remained.
And then he found out what it was like to have several worried calls go unanswered.
‘Do you know where she went?’ he asked the staff in a voice that didn’t quite sound like his. But they didn’t know and, no, Alicia had not used his driver.
She was sulking, Dante told himself. Because he’d suggested that they needed to take some precautions because they hadn’t used protection and he wasn’t on bended knee twenty-four hours in.
But he could feel an odd panic.
He had shielded himself from loss so fiercely that this frantic feeling was almost alien.
He caught sight of himself in the mirror, grey and sweating—and, yes, he looked as cold as if it were a winter’s day.
‘She’s probably stormed off to a hotel,’ he told the butler, but that was quite usual in Dante’s life, and this didn’t feel like the same.
‘Don’t worry,’ his ancient maid said as she came in. ‘She won’t be far. She left her bank card—’
‘Where?’
He went down the very narrow steps and knew exactly what he would find as he opened the drawer next to where her card lay.
She’d won.
And although he knew this wasn’t really a game, Dante knew he’d lost.
‘And she forgot her phone.’ His maid was wheezing from her trips up and down the stairs.
‘We need to go to the airport,’ Dante told his driver, but then wavered, because there were several ways to leave this island—three bridges, the ocean, and a whole lot of sky.
Think, he told himself, before he spun in any one of the directions she might have gone.
He was meant to know her best.
So he knew how much he’d hurt the person he cared about most in the world.
Ever.
She sat at the Fountain of Diana wearing a white muslin smock, with a flash of her red bra on show and her case beside her, and he knew to approach with gentle caution.
‘Alicia?’
She looked up at him, eyes brimming with unshed tears. ‘How was it with your father?’ she asked.
