“I am sorry about her passing,” Mario said, acknowledging his gaffe with a belated apology.
“So am I,” Charlotte said.
After clearing his throat, he asked, far more stridently, “What can I get for you today? Since you are a friend of Luca’s, breakfast is on me.”
“I don’t expect that,” she argued. “I’m happy to pay for my meal.”
Mario lifted his hand. “I won’t hear of it.”
Deciding she’d just leave a big tip, Charlotte asked for the crepe and coffee she’d planned to get, and Luca copied her with his order. After Mario walked away, Charlotte indicated Luca’s phone. “I asked Mr. Heidelman for a picture of Sabrina, but I didn’t get one. Do you have any you can show me? I still don’t know what she looked like.”
He navigated to his photos before turning the screen to face her.
Charlotte’s stomach knotted as she used her fingers to zoom in on the woman who’d given birth to her. They had the same high cheekbones and thick blond hair, the same shade of green eyes and the same squarish chin. Her mother was wearing a black bikini and standing on the beach with Positano behind her. She didn’t have a perfect figure, but she had a golden tan and looked healthy and robust. She also seemed comfortable with who she was—there was no self-consciousness in front of the camera, which Charlotte found appealing. Sabrina’s smile revealed teeth she’d probably whitened a great deal—they were whiter than most women her age—but what ultimately drew Charlotte’s attention was the way her mother’s smile brought her whole face alive. She looked as if she would’ve been the life of any party—and she’d obviously been quite adventurous or she wouldn’t have moved to Italy.
“She was beautiful, no?” Luca said softly.
Charlotte thought Lilly looked even more like Sabrina than she did. If Sabrina served as any indication, Lilly would turn a lot of heads in a few years. “Even prettier than I’d imagined.”
Luca straightened. “After seeing your own face in the mirror, how can you be surprised?”
“I don’t know.” She supposed the impression she’d received of her mother, knowing she went from one man to another every year or two, had created an image in her mind that didn’tmeet with reality. She handed his phone back to him. “Can you send that to me? As well as any others you have?”
“Si.”He acted on her request while Charlotte watched. She was looking forward to a quiet moment when she could pore over those photographs in private. Seeing so much of herself in Sabrina was mind-blowing, since she’d always believed she belonged to Penny.
When he finished, he set his phone aside as she asked, “Were you in love with her?”
He seemed surprised by the directness of this question, but Charlotte knew this would very likely be her only chance to learn all he could tell her about her mother, so she wasn’t holding back. “I... cared for her.”
The equivocation of his answer was obvious. “But you didn’t love her.”
“Icouldhave loved her,” he said. “I wanted to love her. I was excited when she came here, thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I am attracted to Americans,” he confessed with a chuckle. “They are so exuberant, ready to take on the world as if nothing bad could happen. I am drawn to that confidence—the whole American Dream. It’s real, you know? But she wasmolto difficile—very difficult. You understand?”
Lilly had already alerted her, but still she asked, “In what way?”
“Like a spoiled child mixed with a bird that cannot be caged. Never fully satisfied. Never at peace. Restless. Always looking for something better and demanding more of those around her.”
“Selfish?” Charlotte suggested, summing up what he’d just said.
His expression indicated he hated to speak ill of the dead, but she could tell she’d reached the truth. “I suppose I, too, am selfish,” he said, an acknowledgment Charlotte found quite generous. “I never wished her any harm. But when it happened, I was ready for her to go back to America and leave me to my life. Being with her was not as I had imagined. I told her so right before... right before she got into the accident.”
“What kind of accident was it?” Heidelman hadn’t even been able to tell Charlotte how her mother had died. He’d said he’d been told only that she’d passed away and he needed to find her next of kin.
“She got angry when I asked her to move out, stormed from the house and took my Vespa. I tried to stop her, but she almost ran me over as she drove off.” He flung his arm out as he spoke to show his shock, but then his arm returned to his side and his voice went soft again. “She was only a kilometer away when she swerved to avoid something in the road and...”
His words faded away, but Charlotte could easily guess the rest of that sentence. She’d been killed in an accident. “And what?”
“Collided with a bus.”
Charlotte’s fingernails curled into her palms. “Please tell me Lilly didn’t see what happened.”
“No. She was in the other room while we were arguing, doing her schoolwork. She would always disappear when we started to fight. She hated it, of course. What child wouldn’t? She didn’t even know her mother had left. She had AirPods in when I went to tell her there’d been an accident and we had to go to the hospital right away.”
“You’re painting a picture of constant emotional upheaval,” Charlotte said. “Is that what it was like for Lilly?”
“I’m a passionate person. Sabrina was a passionate person.”
“So... yes.”
