Chapter Three #3
There was no need to pay for any of the services. When she pulled a debit card from her new wallet, scrambling to recall just how much she had available, the stylist had shaken her head. ‘It’s all taken care of, by Signor Moretti.’
Of course it was.
The limousine was waiting at the front of the salon when she stepped out, and, even more conveniently, a takeaway coffee and biscuit were stashed in the centre console.
‘Thought you might need a sugar hit,’ the driver said, glancing in the rear-view mirror and offering a kindly wink.
She smiled back at him, taking a bite of the biscuit and thinking it was the most normal thing she’d done all day. Despite the fact her stomach was in knots, she chewed on it gratefully as the car slipped through the streets of London, heading north-east, towards the airport.
The whole morning had been a bombardment of appointments, so she hadn’t stopped to consider when she would reunite with her fiancé, but now that a new and Cinderella-ified version of herself was en route to the airport, she knew it couldn’t be long.
And suddenly, the butterflies that had been kept at bay by how busy and distracted she’d been were ramping up again, hammering her from the inside out.
Her eyes tracked the familiar London buildings as the car went past, an affection for this city, her home, clogging her with emotions.
But her life here had been far from happy.
Even before her mother had left, she could remember their fights.
The screaming matches. The worry about money.
The certainty that she could never have any of the things her peers did—from dolls to money for sweets.
Their flat was cramped, her mother miserable, except for when she put on her favourite music and began to sing, and the whole house suddenly lit up with warmth and love.
The sting of tears caught Amelia by surprise. She blinked quickly, frowning, because she hadn’t thought of her mother with anything other than cool detachment in a long time.
Then again, she was going home now. Home to her mother’s parents, to her last surviving relatives. Home to reconnect with her Italian side—or at least make peace with it, for as long as she was married.
Buildings gave way to highways and green fields, and then, finally, to the unmistakable hallmarks of an airport terminal.
But rather than taking the drive around to the front, the car veered to the right, towards a large security gate with guards on either side.
The driver flashed something through his open window, the guards inspected it, nodded, and the gates swept open.
Amelia craned forward to see better. It was all so different from her usual world, and she wanted to take in every detail.
The limousine came to a stop beside a glass-fronted building, and before she could so much as undo her seat belt, uniformed staff were rushing forward to open her door with a polite, ‘Good afternoon, Signorina Rossi. Signor Moretti is aboard your flight. If you’ll come this way, we’ll process you for travel as quickly as possible. ’
And that they did, from a quick check of her passport, to a reverential and discreet security screening, then she was ushered out of the other side of the terminal, into a waiting black minivan, and driven a short distance to a waiting jet.
A private jet.
Unmistakably, given the matte black colour and the writing down the side—MORETTI.
Her heart stammered right up into her throat as she felt the full force of this man’s wealth slam into her anew.
She’d never so much as been on a plane, and here he owned this enormous one.
Her body seemed to go into autopilot mode, thankfully, as the car door was opened and she managed to step out, onto a roll of carpet that led the way to the stairs and then up onto the plane.
Before she could even take stock of her surrounds, a beautiful woman in uniform appeared, thrusting a glass of champagne into Amelia’s hand and smiling brightly.
‘Signorina Rossi, what a delight it is to have you on board. Signor Moretti is on a call, but has asked you to be settled for take-off, and says he will join you as soon as possible. Let me show you to a seat.’
Amelia could only blink, her brain whirling with that same sense of having been sucked into the very middle of a tornado.
She nodded, clutching the champagne flute like a lifeline, as the elegant woman clipped ahead of her down the aisle of what could only be described as some kind of luxurious penthouse plane.
Her jaw dropped and it was beyond her control to change that as she took in the wide, creamy leather armchairs arranged as living room furniture might be.
Behind them was a partition, and she suspected the plane would go on in this fashion, like some enormous, palatial sky-home.
‘It’s incredible, isn’t it?’ the flight attendant murmured, turning and catching Amelia with her mouth open and eyes frantically scrubbing over the details.
Amelia turned to her, nodding once more.
The woman smiled. ‘Please, have a seat,’ she offered. Amelia took the armchair closest to the aisle, placing her handbag on the seat beside it. ‘Lunch will be served once we’ve reached cruising altitude.’
‘Thank you,’ she murmured, to the woman’s retreating back. It felt like the most surreal dream she could have conjured. This time, the morning before, she’d been preparing for a double shift in the diner. Today? She was on board her fiancé’s luxurious jet, about to set off to Italy.
The diner! She gasped, lifting her free hand to her lips, as she remembered she had a job, and people who were counting on her.
She reached into her bag and removed her phone, quickly typing out a text to her manager, asking for some time off.
She felt incredibly guilty, but this situation had really just exploded in her face.
While letting her employer down wasn’t ideal, it truly couldn’t be helped, in the circumstances.
There was no one else to let know. She’d left a note for her flatmates, but her bed rental was on a week-by-week basis.
There were no friends. No one close, who’d care she’d left. Emptiness rolled in her belly.
The noise picked up as the engines began to spin and Amelia settled back in the chair, staring out of the porthole window at the airport and beyond it, in the far distance, the city.
A nostalgic smile twisted on her lips, but then the plane began to move, taxiing slowly at first and then picking up speed, so any hint of a smile dropped and she felt a rush of panic for the sheer power of this thing.
A minute later, and the plane was launching into the sky, angling upwards, so the unfamiliar sensations gripped Amelia and she almost gasped.
She took another drink of her champagne, and then another, until the glass was drained, but it didn’t help to ease her panicked nerves.
As the plane soared higher, it encountered clouds, and bumped around a little, which Amelia absolutely hated.
And she had the strangest, most ridiculous wish that Massimiliano were there.
Not for Massimiliano himself, per se, but because he was someone else, someone who flew often, who would have been able to reassure her that this was normal.
Instead, she was left to endure this on her own, the first of many new experiences this new version of Amelia was to be thrown into. It was what she’d agreed to—there was nothing for it but to sit back and hope. Hope that it would be okay. Hope that she would be okay.
But for Amelia, who’d frequently found that life was willing to throw the worst of the worst at her, hope was hard to cling to.