She really did hate him, Ivy decided. He wasn’t even here—she had no idea where he was, as a matter of fact—and yet he’d still managed to ruin her safe space for her. It was unforgivable.
Ivy spent another restless night in Kensington, but even though the sun came out that following morning, she couldn’t settle. She felt…inside out. More than that, it was like she wasmarked. She’d gone ahead and married the man and now she was linked with him. No one who knew her in London wouldn’t also know of her change in circumstances because the entire world knew about her wedding, and she didn’t think she could bear discussing it.
Because he could be anywhere. Doing anything. They had both promised Umberto discretion. Not abstinence.
And she hated herself for thinking that. If she hadn’t gone ahead and foolishly fallen in love with him, what would she care what he was doing?
Yet the reality was that she cared entirely too much, and that was why she booked herself on the Eurostar and headed for France. She took the train under the Channel into Paris and the fast train down to Nice with glorious views as they approached the Côte d’Azur.
Once there, she didn’t go to Cap Ferrat. She found herself a room in an old hotel in Nice the way her parents had one year, according to the stories her mother had told her. She tried to recreate those memories of hers that were not true memories of what happened, but memories of the tales Alana had shared with her. Of the nights she and her mother would cuddle in Alana’s bed and Alana would talk of markets in the streets, of macarons in colorful lines in glass bakery cases, of echoey hillside villages, of lavender fields, and the gleaming coastal walk from Nice to Villefranche-sur Mer.
Ivy was looking for her mother on the breeze or out there in the sunshine that dappled the blue waves, but she didn’t find her. Not the way she wanted to. Not the way she had before.
Still she let herself wander, avoiding any hint of tabloid gossip or snarky papers. It was just her and the sea. Her and her memories. And as she sat on a bench near the water, in a place no one alive knew to look for her, she found something else instead.
Her poor heart.
Her optimistic, foolish heart that had hated Giaco Tavian for all the right reasons—and would love it if she could hate him again.
But she didn’t hate him.
She couldn’t hate him—and she’d tried.
When she understood that, she understood her own mother, too.
Baffling as Ivy had found it, Alana really had loved Umberto. Her memories told her that truth whether she wanted to face it or not. Maybe not as time went on, but at first, the man had made Alana feel safe. He’d vowed to cherish her, and had not revealed until much later that the way he cherished anything was to collect it and forget it. But long before that became clear, Umberto was the first man since Ivy’s father who had made Alana seem…peaceful.
That was a realization Ivy didn’t want any part of, but she couldn’t escape it once it came to her. Once the inescapable truth of it settled into her bones and stayed there. She found herself staring out at sea where sailboats danced on the waves and the larger, overwrought yachts of the very rich slid by like planets orbiting the sun.
Umberto had made Alana feel safe, and even happy, for a time. Maybe they’d had a chemistry that was inexplicable to anyone on the outside—the kind of chemistry Ivy could never have understood until now. But what Ivy knew for a fact about her mother was that Alana had never been mercenary. Alana had loved deeply or not at all. She had put her heart into everything she did and it had made her weak in a way, Ivy supposed. It had been her greatest strength and her greatest vulnerability. It had made her the luminous actress that she was and it was why her legend would continue long after Ivy was forgotten.
It was also the legacy that Alana had left her daughter.
The ability to love against all odds, in the face of adversity—and in many ways, Ivy thought, without hope.
There was nothing weak about that, Ivy understood now. It was a wild and terrible strength. And it was no wonder it was hard for Ivy to accept what was happening to her now, because she’d shut her own heart off on the day she’d watched them put her mother in the ground.
Looking back, she couldn’t even have said what specific thing had happened at the funeral to set her off. All she’d known that day was that she was done. She couldn’t stay in the place where her mother had died, married to a man who had treated the woman who loved him so much, against all reason, like an afterthought at best.
But the way that Umberto had behaved had nothing to do with the way Alana had loved.
Ivy understood that more in this moment than she ever had before. More than she would have been capable of understanding a few months ago. Maybe she’d needed all of this to happen with Giaco so that she could finally see her mother as she’d really, truly been.
Flawed, certainly. Insecure and needy, also true.
But when Alana Amis had loved, she had loved with every single part of herself and she’d never given up. Not ever.
Not even if it was patently obvious that the man she loved was not worthy of her.
Standing there in the South of France where her mother had told her once that she’d been conceived in the deepest love imaginable, Ivy stopped thinking about what sheshoulddo. What sheoughtto do. What would be thestrong and powerfulthing to do, as some kind of response to Giaco’s departure.
Instead of all of that, she listened to her poor, broken, wildly optimistic heart instead, because it still believed in magic.
Shestill believed in magic.
And then she went back home. To Rome.
Because she could love Giaco enough for both of them. She had her mother’s heart, and lucky for her, she was more resilient than her mother had been.
