Chapter 19
19
Sophie woke up disoriented and sweaty – and squashed. Andreas had curled his limbs around her in the night like a giant squid and his leg was heavy. But when she glanced across the pillow and caught sight of his face, lax with sleep, a glow spread through her.
His lashes were dark and thick, his lips broad and lopsided. And he thought he disappointed everyone. He felt unsure of himself in the valley. He came alive on the mountain, but there was trauma in him too, that he clearly hadn’t processed.
Trauma, she recognised, although he knew nothing about hers and it was probably better that way, especially given his odd reaction every time Rory came up in conversation and his own attitude to marriage and families.
But Sophie wasn’t a psychologist. She couldn’t advise him – she could only accept him, for a little while at least. She knew this time, she couldn’t tie him down. His family took their worry out on him and it only did damage. If he needed to shake off gravity and commitment occasionally, then she couldn’t change that.
Which meant they had a week. A safe timeframe – far too short to fall in love again. In a week, she would go back to her normal life and he would go back to his and if they didn’t keep in touch, she might be able to get over him enough to one day find someone else, as much as that thought felt distasteful when she was awash with gratification to be tucked up against him. Lying next to him, snuggling like a puppy, it felt as though she’d missed him every day for the past eight years.
Including the days she’d spent as Rory’s wife.
The disturbing thought made her ease away as gently as she could. How he turned her from a sensible person into this sentimental mush of a human being, she didn’t know, but it was dangerous how good it felt to touch him.
She draped her cardigan around herself and tucked her feet into Andreas’s enormous Birkenstocks, to shuffle into the kitchen, where she found Petra putting the moka pot on the stove, already dressed for the day.
‘Buongiorno— I mean?—’
‘Buongiorno,’ Petra replied reassuringly. ‘And gria? di. Would you like some coffee? We can go soon. We live farm hours and might have the city to ourselves before anyone else leaves the house. I assume Andreas left to go climbing already? I didn’t hear him.’
Sophie realised with a start that Andreas usually did get up with the birds on his free days to enjoy the sacred hours on a rock face somewhere. ‘Actually, he’s still asleep,’ she said with a frown.
He wasn’t for long, emerging wearing only his loose boxer shorts and a scowl. He filled a glass of water at the sink and Sophie tried not to stare. He was more dishevelled than usual, groggier than he’d been the other mornings, even though she didn’t think he’d drunk too much wine the previous evening.
Dishevelled was unfortunately a good look on him, as though his hair was mussed from her fingers and they’d stayed up late last night doing more than just talking.
Sophie rushed to wash and get ready so she didn’t hold up Petra and Caro and Andreas waved them off, still looking oddly disoriented.
The shops in the centre of Verona were just opening their doors as the trio arrived at the Via Mazzini after parking the car – a slightly newer Fiat Panda.
‘We have to visit the shops here before the crowds arrive,’ Caro said.
Even for early in the morning, the pedestrian zone was buzzing with shoppers walking beneath the wrought-iron balconies that inevitably made visitors think of Romeo and Juliet in this town. The Gucci store in a historic stone building with arched, stuccoed windows was still closed, which didn’t bother Petra and Caro, as they seemed to have their favourite smaller boutiques.
By the time they emerged onto Piazza Erbe, the Saturday-morning bustle was in full swing. Petra seemed a little stressed by the crowds – as Sophie knew Andreas would have been – but Sophie enjoyed the buzz of conversation in Italian, the stallholders selling scarves and hats, jewellery, souvenirs and towels with the image of the Venetian winged lion. Behind them, the Mazzanti houses took the scene five hundred years back in time with their decorative patterns and frescoes of long-forgotten figures.
The buildings on the square were tightly packed, the morning sun picking up the yellow and white and terracotta of the render. The crooked balconies overflowed with plants and two historic towers of ancient brick rose above the long square, into the blue sky.
‘A bride and groom had photos taken here last year,’ she said as they passed the Domus Mercatorum, the striped brick structure on the corner with crenellations and arched windows. ‘We came here at six in the morning to whirl past all the sights with the photographer.’
‘Ouch, that’s early!’ Caro said emphatically. ‘Our farm hours aren’t that bad.’
‘The photos were amazing, though,’ Sophie said, smiling as she remembered the bride’s serene smile as she posed in her flowing dress in front of the Roman arena as the sunlight burst across the sky. ‘Let me show you.’
She unlocked her phone and tapped the gallery app, but then froze when she noticed she’d forgotten to close the app and instead of the little grid of thumbnails, a larger photo appeared on her screen – a photo she wasn’t quite fast enough to shut down.
Of course Caro was too quick to have missed it. ‘Was that Andreas? Did you have him practising a wedding with you?’
‘What’s that?’
Sophie held her phone to her chest, her mind racing. ‘I just needed to check how it would look – for my clients!’
‘May I see?’
Sophie wasn’t sure how she could refuse that request, asked so softly by Andreas’s mother, so she swallowed her cringe and unlocked her phone again. ‘The framing isn’t great. A stranger took it. The cross should be slightly off-centre. And the bride is going to have flowers in her hair and hopefully look a bit fresher than me—’ She cut off her babbling, not sure if Petra and Caro were even listening.
When Petra looked up, she had a light in her eyes that made Sophie’s stomach dip. Taking a deep breath, she blurted out the words she probably should have said last night. ‘I should tell you that we aren’t together and we have no intention of being together despite… everything you’ve seen.’
There was only a nod in reply.
Sophie decided it was better to imply that the reasons they weren’t together lay with her. ‘I mean, after what happened eight years ago, there’s no way I could consider a relationship with him again.’
‘After what happened… You mean with Miro?’ Petra asked.
‘I meant between him and me. The twenty-ninth of February thing.’ She mumbled the last part.
‘What happened on the twenty-ninth of February?’
Didn’t they know? Or had she confused them? ‘It’s the… date where traditionally, women have been able to ask men to marry them.’ It sounded so foolish. Her cheeks were hot and she wished she’d never been that twenty-six-year-old idiot who’d taken those traditions seriously.
Caro clasped her forearm. ‘You asked him to marry you?’
Oh God, she needed a hole to fall into right now. She gritted her teeth, cursing Andreas.
‘Wow, I’m impressed,’ Caro continued.
‘He said no,’ she added, only realising the absurdity of that comment far too late.
‘But what about—?’ Caro bit her lip and glanced at Petra. ‘I thought you broke up after he got back from Gasherbrum? That’s what he said anyway.’
Sophie stifled a grumble at Andreas and his ‘break’ versus ‘break-up’ pedantry. She’d never seen him again. That was clearly enough of a break-up.
‘No, he turned me down and then we broke up. It was probably for the best.’ She should have said, It was for the best , but that continuing pull between her and Andreas wouldn’t let her.
‘I felt certain we’d meet you one day, but I didn’t imagine these would be the circumstances,’ Petra said smoothly, glancing at Sophie’s phone. ‘It was partly my fault that he never brought you home.’
‘Why? Andreas is the one who didn’t want to introduce me to you. I mean, I know he had his reasons, but I don’t understand why you would blame yourself.’
Petra’s cheeks went pink and Caro laughed.
‘Because Mama overdid the drama when he told us about you,’ his sister explained.
‘I was happy for him,’ Petra insisted. ‘He’s always been so lonely – you know he’d never admit it. He never felt he quite fit in at home on the farm. He had Miro, but Miro always had Toni. But then he had… you, Sophie.’
The goosebumps that skittered up her arm were out of place on the hot day. ‘Surely he’s had other girlfriends – before that and since?’
When Petra shook her head, the goosebumps dug in. ‘Very few we’d heard about and no one he really loved.’
She didn’t mean Andreas had loved her, Sophie was certain.
‘He was living at home at the time, saving money for Gasherbrum,’ she said, her tone growing dismissive as she said the name of the mountain. ‘When it got to around six o’clock each day, he’d start glancing at his phone obsessively, picking it up and putting it down and going out to the garden and back inside. Then the phone would ring and he’d disappear upstairs, like a child going to the Christmas tree.’
Sophie’s stomach twisted as the image burrowed into her heart in vivid focus.
‘I did wonder whether you’d come – after Gasherbrum, after Miro?—’
‘Mama,’ Caro scolded gently. ‘It’s not Sophie’s fault, especially after what Andreas did, turning her down.’
‘He took it hard didn’t he? Miro’s death?’ Sophie asked, thinking of Andreas’s tone the night before. He was still grieving, as much as he’d tried to reason with what had happened.
‘Very hard,’ Petra confirmed gravely. ‘For a little while, I hoped at least one good thing might come of it: that he’d stop taking these risks. But he was even worse after he recovered from Miro’s death as well as his own injuries.’
The renewed twinge in Sophie’s stomach was uncomfortable, especially with her mind running wild with images of Andreas sick and injured. She’d read reports about the expedition, but she’d never allowed herself to picture what it had meant that he’d lost his best friend and sustained injuries himself. Part of her wished she’d been there for him, but she was trying to be sensible about her feelings and nursing him through a difficult time would only have dug her in deeper.
‘We really thought you’d broken up with him then, during that awful time,’ Petra said with a grimace.
‘Although I wouldn’t have blamed you,’ Caro added. ‘He was a wounded bear, nipping at everyone who came too close.’
‘I still don’t know why he led you to believe I broke up with him.’
‘He said you weren’t at the airport to meet him when he got back.’ Petra looked as though she could have added more.
‘I didn’t even know when he was coming back. He never contacted me a?—’
An uneasy thought struck her, a split-second decision she’d made with her heart bruised from his rejection, convinced he’d only been letting her down gently by suggesting they go on a break. But surely he wouldn’t have tried to contact her after the way they’d parted.
‘He hasn’t told me a lot about that time,’ she said. ‘Not that I expect him to. We’re colleagues now – friends.’
‘Friends, hmm?’ Caro said with a chuckle as Sophie shook off her confusion. ‘I think you’re the only person who could convince him to attend a wedding!’
‘I haven’t convinced him yet,’ she insisted, catching sight of a three-piece suit in a shop window. ‘And I don’t think there’s any way I could convince him to come to the reception. Does he even own a suit?’
‘I think Andreas would go up in flames if he ever touched a suit,’ Caro said wryly.
Sophie managed a distracted chuckle. ‘I think you might be right.’