Page 113 of The Fall Affair

I smiled. “I need to get going to feed my cat, but I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye. I had a really great time last night.”

“It is the first of many good times, yes?”

I nodded. “Definitely.”

She rested her hands on my shoulders and kissed both my cheeks. “I hope you wind up staying for you, but also, selfishly, for me, too.”

Chapter 38

Matteo

“WHERE’S ALLEGRA?” MY sister plopped down on the seat next to me. I hadn’t even heard her come in for Sunday dinner at my parents’. She was probably the sixth person to ask that question, even though the crowd this month was only about ten.

“She’s busy.”

She squinted and stared at me for ten long seconds. “You’re lying.”

I could technically be telling the truth. But I wouldn’t know it since I hadn’t spoken to Allegra in a week.

“I’m not in da mood, Luciana.”

“What did you do?”

“Why do you assume I did something?”

“Because you find an excuse to screw it up with every woman you’ve met the last few years.” She sighed. “I loved Isabella, and I know what you two had was special, but it ended, and she’s gone, Matteo.”

I scoffed and threw back the rest of my wine. “What we had wasn’t special. It was a lie. And I was a damn fool.”

Luciana shook her head. “Falling in love doesn’t make you a fool. Isabella’s love for you was pure, but she was a butterfly—her soul was never meant to stay in one place too long.”

I laughed maniacally. “Pure? Yeah, pure fiction.”

My sister’s forehead wrinkled. “What are you talking about?”

I met her eyes. “Izzy was cheating on me. That’s why she left. She didn’t come back when she got sick because she loved me. She came back because she knew I was a sucker who would take care of her.”

“How do you know that?”

I filled my sister in on what I’d discovered last week. Her jaw was hanging open when I finished.

“I can’t believe that. Are you sure it means what you think it does? Maybe the entire collection is a love story she made up. She was really creative.”

I shook my head. “I remember her taking trips around the times the photos were dated—to visit her mother, her brother. To take a two-week-long class when she’d decided she wanted to be a pastry chef.”

“And you never saw the tea set before?”

“Only the one cup I found in an old box of her things after she died. But there was no photo or note like the others had. I thought it was just a landscape she’d painted.”

Luciana crossed her arms. “I don’t want to believe it. But even if all of that is true, what does it have to do with Allegra?”

My heart squeezed just hearing her name. “She got offered a job in New York.”

“And she wants to take it?”

“It doesn’t matter. If I’ve learned one thing about relationships, it’s that you both have to want the same thing. Izzy never wanted to be tied down. She wanted to pack up and move every six months, like her family did. I thought I was saving her from that life, but it turned out I was holding her back.”

“You know what I just heard? I heard that Allegra was going to turn down da job, and you told her to take it and leave because you’re scared.”