‘Are you worried he won’t want to see you?’
‘No…’ If anything, the opposite.
‘I just think,’ Daphne said, far too matter-of-factly for the subject of their discussion, folding her hands over her stomach as she stretched out on the second sunlounger, ‘that if you don’t go – even if it’s just to say goodbye – you will always wonder what might have happened.’
‘Nothing is going to change if I say goodbye.’ She meant practically. She would still miss him; he would still live his solitary life here. But if she’d learned anything over the past two weeks, it was that every moment changed people’s lives – usually infinitesimally, but occasionally in a giant crack from one heartbeat to the next.
She wasn’t sure she wanted whatever change she’d get if she drove up to Gabri’s home one more time, but she did wonder what that change would be. Daphne had a point.
Scrambling to her feet, she pressed a quick, impulsive kiss to her mother’s hair and ignored the self-satisfied smile. ‘I won’t be long,’ she promised.
Daphne waved her off. ‘Take your time. We’ve got five hours until the ferry. Five hours to fill – somehow.’
As Toni headed back up to the car park, she heard her mother call after her and turned to find her peering around the sunlounger.
‘Do you still have condoms?’ Daphne mouthed urgently.
She shushed her mother with a scowl and a finger to her lips.
31
Although Toni had never driven to the house herself, she easily found the end of the road, with the parked motorini – and the little blue Fiat that had been one of many unexpected things about Gabriele Orzati she’d learned on that first day. Good – he was home. Or maybe not so good, since that meant she was doing this, whatever ‘this’ was.
She was not going to beg him to visit – or write to her (that sounded very Jane Austen). She just wanted an uninterrupted moment to file this relationship away somewhere that made sense – somewhere she could perhaps enjoy it later.
Making her way up the stone steps, her fingers brushing the geraniums in their pots, she made it as far as the terrace before she realised she wasn’t the only woman visiting Gabriele Orzati at his home. She’d been so busy cataloguing her memories of that blue Fiat that she hadn’t processed the fact that there had been another car parked where the asphalt ran out and the clifftop footpath began.
And anyway, nothing could have prepared her for the sight of a pretty, pale-haired woman on his doorstep with a sun hat on her head and a clearly pregnant belly.
Toni froze, struggling to wind back her thoughts enough to move her feet in the opposite direction – quickly. Whoever this woman was – and she had a strong suspicion – Toni didn’t want to intrude. Her own goodbye was doomed anyway.
But as she managed her first step backwards, she upset a terracotta pot of blooming echinacea and the scrape and clang drew the other woman’s eyes to her. Surprise registered first, then suspicion. Toni didn’t want to believe Gabri might have lied to her in any way – shedidn’tbelieve it – but this woman obviously had a greater part in his life than Toni had – or ever would.
‘Ciao,’ the other woman began.
‘Ciao,’ Toni parroted, but quickly fended off the impending barrage of words she couldn’t understand with a clumsy defence. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak Italian.’
More surprise. ‘You’re a tourist?’
‘Not exactly.’ The hairs on the back of her neck standing at attention, she deflected, ‘I work with Gabri – on the weddings. We held one at Innamorata yesterday and he did the flowers. But I’m leaving the island today and I can just send him a message, if you need to?—’
Disappointment that she wouldn’t be able to say the goodbye she wasn’t even sure she’d wanted landed on her like an unexpected blow. Urgh, these teenage feelings were ridiculous and inconvenient and preposterous in her situation.
‘He’s not here anyway,’ the other woman explained. ‘I’ll have to come back later. I just need a signature from him, actually, although I was hoping to see how he was. I’m… his ex-wife,’ she explained.
‘A signature?’ On divorce papers? Toni was already tied up in her own assumptions and the next slid into her mind unimpeded.
‘It’s a little messy,’ the woman – Rosalba was her name, Toni remembered – continued. ‘We’re still the co-owners of our company. He wanted to give me legal powers even after we divorced, but… I don’t know. I think he might need the connection to the outside world sometimes.’
The small woman sighed, her obvious concern for Gabri loosening Toni’s discomfort a notch.
‘The baby’s not his, you know,’ she added with a quirk of a smile.
‘Oh, I— Of course not. It’s been five years, right? But congratulations.’ Toni knew how much this woman had wanted the child.
‘Have you worked with him long?’ Rosalba made little effort to conceal her curiosity.
‘About a year.’ A year and two intense weeks to rewrite their friendship.
