Page 93 of Italy and Forever

‘You know what this means,’ Kira said, giving her a pointed look.

‘No?’

‘Ginny, you thought he didn’t want to see you and he thought you didn’t want to see him, but maybe you’re both wrong? You have to talk to him before he goes.’

Her stomach twisted at the prospect. Part of her was desperate to see him again. But she also knew their ‘moment’ was over. Just because he’d turned up at her parents’ house didn’t mean otherwise.

‘He’s still leaving,’ Ginny said with a sigh.

Arriving at her parents’ terrace that evening, she allowed her dad to enfold her in a squeezier hug than usual before thrusting the bulging paper bag of chestnuts at him. He peered at them and although there was nothing incriminating in Rhys’s scrawled note, she still felt self-conscious handing it over. It was the only example of his handwriting she had and she was apparently still a hopeless romantic if she’d thought of that.

Her stepmum, Vivienne, embraced her as though this were a funeral. Perhaps it was – for her love life.

‘Okay, first have some wine.’

Ginny peered doubtfully at her dad. He didn’t usually thrust wine into her hand as though she might need it.

‘Now sit down here.’ He ushered her to the sofa.

With a flash of imagination, she pictured Rhys sitting here and wished she could have been a fly on the wall.

‘We’ve lit the firepit and it’ll be great for those chestnuts. I’ve looked up how to roast them. So we’ll check on the fire and get dinner ready while you look through your photos.’

‘Photos?’ Of course. What else would Rhys give her? He’d promised to develop the film she’d shot that day at the chapel. Maybe all she’d find inside was a photo of a vulture circling.

When Greg handed over a plain envelope, she pressed it between her fingers without opening it at first. It was too thick to be just the three photos she’d taken. Her curiosity quickly got the better of her caution and she opened the envelope.

She was in tears before she got to the third photo. He was a genius. She swore there was more in those photographs than anyone had seen on the day. He captured context, some kind of truth, and she had to wonder whether that instinct was more intense now he couldn’t remember faces. It was especially disorienting when that truth was herself.

They were mostly candid shots and more often than not her hair was in her face and the angle clearly caught the bend in her ears, but he made her look whole, a complete person living her own unique life in the way she was meant to. He couldn’t have been certain what he’d captured on her face, but it was a lot more than any awkward selfie where she was hiding everything for the aesthetic.

She flipped over to the photo she’d taken of the mountain village with the Dolomite peaks in the background and then she was smiling through her tears. It wasn’t a great photo, a little grainy and out of focus in unexpected places. But the light was extraordinary because of Rhys’s expertise with the exposure settings he’d set up before handing her the device.

The next photo – the vulture shot she’d been expecting – was downright terrible. She apparently had no luck with photographic moments or romantic ones. But when she flipped to the next one, her breath stopped entirely.

Although she remembered him snapping the shot almost carelessly, he’d turned her face into art. It was nothing like most of the photos of herself she’d had taken, where she was smiling brightly into the camera, still the school kid trying to look nice in the class photo. Here, she was form and colour, skin and bone, beauty and soul.

This photo was the greatest gift anyone had ever given her.

With her jaw wobbling, she turned to the last photo in the stack. If her close-up portrait had stopped her system in shock, everything revved up again at the sight of him peering up at her from the photo. The framing was basic but his face wasn’t.

In that one reserved look, she saw all of the smiles he’d sparingly bestowed on her. How had she forgotten the way his eyes drew her in?

I love you.

Would she have said it, if they’d talked properly that Sunday after the wedding? Knowing her, she probably would have. But did he want to hear it?

‘Darling?’ Vivi peered through the door from the kitchen. ‘You okay?’

‘I don’t know,’ she answered honestly. ‘But you can come in.’

‘Your dad said I shouldn’t look at the pictures unless you wanted me to. He took a peek while Rhys was here and thought perhaps he shouldn’t have.’

Ginny managed a chuckle, imagining the interaction again. ‘You’re welcome to see. Rhys already told me he took far too many pictures of me during the wedding. He must have gone through and sifted them out before sending the files to I Do.’

She pushed the photos in her stepmother’s direction and she flipped through them, oohing and ahhing.

‘I took these,’ she explained when Vivi reached the landscape shot, ‘on a film camera. It certainly made me think differently about photos. The camera is older than I am, apparently.’