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‘And what if I didn’t want to get married?’
‘That’s hardly the point. You should have made him do the honourable thing.’
Tina doubted she had ever hated her mother quite so much. ‘Like you made Mitch do when you got pregnant? Tell me, Lily, were you hoping for a miscarriage once you had that ring on your finger? Were you hoping to escape the birth once you had the husband, given you never really wanted a child?’
‘That’s not fair!’
‘Isn’t it? Sorry I didn’t oblige. Lucky, though, in a way, given the mess you’re in now.’
She turned to leave. ‘Goodbye, Lily. I don’t expect to see you again while I’m here.’
‘Where are you going?’
And she looked back over her shoulder. ‘To hell. But don’t go thinking it’s on your account.’
* * *
The taxi dropped him back at the water door of his own palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal. Aldo came down to meet him, swinging open the iron gate as he alighted from the vessel. ‘And the company you were expecting?’
‘A change of plan, Aldo. I will be dining alone tonight. I will eat in the study.’
Luca crossed the tiled floor and took the marble steps up into the house three at a time. A temporary change of plan, he had no doubt. Once Valentina slept on the choices she had, she would see she had no choice at all. She would soon come crawling, begging for him to rescue her family from the nightmare of her mother’s making.
He entered the study, but eschewed the wide desk where his computer and work waited patiently and went straight to the windows instead, opening a window door leading to a balcony and gazing out over the canal at night, the vaporettos lit up with the flash of a hundred cameras, the heavy barges that performed the grunt work in place of trucks. Never did he tire of the endless tapestry of life in Venice, the slap of water against the pilings, the rich tenor strains of a gondolier as he massaged his gondola’s way along the canals. But then his family had been here for centuries after all. No wonder he sometimes felt his veins ran not with blood but with water from these very canals.
It spoke to him now. Told him to be patient. That he was closer than he thought.
He saw the colour of her eyes in the golden light from a window across the canal. Amber eyes and hair shot with golden lights—she might have lost weight, she might have been travelling for more than a day and the skin under her eyes tired, but the intervening years had been good to her. She was more beautiful than he remembered.
And he hungered for her.
But she would soon come crawling.
And he would have her.
* * *
She got the address from Carmela, who hugged her tight to her chest before putting her at arm’s length and kissing her solemnly on both cheeks. ‘You come back if you need anything, anything at all. You come back and see Carmela. I will help you, bella.’
She hugged the older woman back, clutching the piece of paper with the address and the rough map Carmela had drawn for her. Luca had said it wasn’t far. It didn’t help that evening had closed in and that the canals were inky-black ribbons running between islands of jam-packed buildings, it didn’t help that she knew she had been awake for a dozen hours too many to feel alive, but she was running on anger now, her veins infused with one hundred per cent fury, and there was no way she was staying in her mother’s house a moment longer and no way she could have slept if she tried.
She made a mistake with the vaporetto, boarding the wrong one in her rush to get away and she had to get off at the next stop and backtrack to find another. She found herself lost in the dark calles three times, stumbling onwards as if she were blind until she found a sign on a wall with a name she recognised, telling her she was on the right track.
But all of these inconveniences just gave her the time to think. To reconsider why she was so prepared to jump into the lion’s den—a place she had promised herself never to go again.
It wasn’t for her mother, she knew. She’d been prepared to turn her back and walk away and leave her mother to her own devices.
It wasn’t for herself. Oh God, no. She hated him after what he’d said, and what he’d done. Hated him for not caring when he could have. Hated him for the unsettling, unwanted effect he had on her, even in the midst of hating him. She wanted nothing more to do with the man.
No, this was for her father, who somehow thought that if he helped Lily in this current crisis, he was making it easier on his daughter. What had Lily told him of her plight? What dramas had she woven around the thin ribbons that still bonded them together, even after a divorce of more than twenty years?
