chapter 14
Luca wore linen again—shirt and shorts—with leather sandals and a gold chain. Today he’d added a straw fedora and smelled
like he’d put on a whole bottle of cologne. Beneath the hat, his dark hair curled, still wet—presumably from a shower—and
he had the dark shadow of beard growth on his cheeks and chin, all of which he’d neatly trimmed.
Charlotte couldn’t call him unattractive—he wasn’t. He was probably fifteen years older than she was, but he’d aged well and
looked younger than that. She could see why her birth mother had been attracted to him. When he held the door for her and
flashed her that dashing smile, she realized he was also quite charming.
“Let’s sit in the corner,” he suggested, immediately taking charge. “Mario will be over to get our order when he has un momento.” He called out in Italian to Mario, who was working behind a display case that had a pile of menus on top, two of which
Luca grabbed before following her over to the table he’d indicated.
The restaurant’s wide glass doors were flung open to the street, letting in the scent of salt and citrus.
Inside, the air buzzed with English—mostly American voices trading travel tips over cappuccinos.
Lemons gleamed everywhere: painted on plates and pitchers, curling across tilework, clustered in bright ceramic bowls.
She was growing familiar with the blue and yellow that was so prevalent here, saw the same motif in shop after shop.
“I like all the ceramics you have here,” she commented as Luca hurried to pull out her chair. “It’s cheerful, clean looking
and creates such a unique sense of place.”
He took his own seat across from her. “Fatto a mano, signorina—It’s made here. Some Italian families have been in this business for generations.”
“We love the limoni. They grow enormi in Southern Italy—huge, you know what this means? Some are as big as your head.”
“No!” she said disbelievingly.
“Si!” he insisted. “The limone sfusato Amalfitano is three times the size of your piddly US lemon.” He grinned. “But it is the cedro—the citron—that is really big. We have limoni everywhere, which is why we put them in whatever we cook and on whatever we paint. Have you tried the pasta al limone?”
“I haven’t been here long enough yet.”
“I will recommend a place. But this morning, you must order the crespelle. You say crepes, like the French, si? Sweet or savory. Both are deliziose.” When he kissed his fingertips like she’d seen actors do in the movies when depicting Italian characters, she had to laugh.
“What?” he asked, taken off guard.
“That was just a very stereotypical thing for an Italian to do, I guess,” she replied.
He winked at her. “Eh, ma io sono italiano, no?”
She couldn’t help grinning. “And that means?”
He laughed. “I am italiano, no?”
She accepted the menu he handed her and decided to get the Nutella-and-strawberry crespelle with an oat-milk latte.
He insisted the burgers his friend Mario served were also the best in town, but her stomach was churning too much to eat anything as heavy as a burger, especially for breakfast. Although she was starting to like Luca, he was still handing her a very difficult problem.
She needed to figure out what she was going to do about it.
When Mario didn’t come over right away, Luca called out to him despite all the other patrons in the restaurant. He joked that
the owner should get his priorities straight and serve his friends first, and they both laughed as Mario ignored two other
customers who’d been vying for his attention to walk over to them.
The two men exchanged a few moments of what sounded like cheerful banter. Then Charlotte heard the word bellissima as Mario looked her over with an appreciative eye. “I knew your mother,” he said to her in English. “She was also beautiful.”
Charlotte felt a pang in her chest. He was talking about a woman she’d never met, would never have the chance to meet, and
the finality of that bothered her, even though, logically, she told herself it shouldn’t. She’d been far luckier than Lilly;
she’d always had everything she needed.
The men sobered when she glanced away. Sabrina was gone, and she’d died quite suddenly. The fact that she was young and healthy
at the time, and should’ve been around to finish raising Lilly, made it even more of a tragedy.
“I am sorry about her passing,” Mario said, acknowledging his gaffe with a belated apology.
“So am I,” Charlotte said.
After clearing his throat, he asked, far more stridently, “What can I get for you today? Since you are a friend of Luca’s,
breakfast is on me.”
“I don’t expect that,” she argued. “I’m happy to pay for my meal.”
Mario lifted his hand. “I won’t hear of it.”
Deciding she’d just leave a big tip, Charlotte asked for the crepe and coffee she’d planned to get, and Luca copied her with
his order. After Mario walked away, Charlotte indicated Luca’s phone. “I asked Mr. Heidelman for a picture of Sabrina, but
I didn’t get one. Do you have any you can show me? I still don’t know what she looked like.”
He navigated to his photos before turning the screen to face her.
Charlotte’s stomach knotted as she used her fingers to zoom in on the woman who’d given birth to her. They had the same high
cheekbones and thick blond hair, the same shade of green eyes and the same squarish chin. Her mother was wearing a black bikini
and standing on the beach with Positano behind her. She didn’t have a perfect figure, but she had a golden tan and looked
healthy and robust. She also seemed comfortable with who she was—there was no self-consciousness in front of the camera, which
Charlotte found appealing. Sabrina’s smile revealed teeth she’d probably whitened a great deal—they were whiter than most
women her age—but what ultimately drew Charlotte’s attention was the way her mother’s smile brought her whole face alive.
She looked as if she would’ve been the life of any party—and she’d obviously been quite adventurous or she wouldn’t have moved
to Italy.
“She was beautiful, no?” Luca said softly.
Charlotte thought Lilly looked even more like Sabrina than she did. If Sabrina served as any indication, Lilly would turn
a lot of heads in a few years. “Even prettier than I’d imagined.”
Luca straightened. “After seeing your own face in the mirror, how can you be surprised?”
“I don’t know.” She supposed the impression she’d received of her mother, knowing she went from one man to another every year or two, had created an image in her mind that didn’t meet with reality. She handed his phone back to him. “Can you send that to me? As well as any others you have?”
“Si.” He acted on her request while Charlotte watched. She was looking forward to a quiet moment when she could pore over those
photographs in private. Seeing so much of herself in Sabrina was mind-blowing, since she’d always believed she belonged to
Penny.
When he finished, he set his phone aside as she asked, “Were you in love with her?”
He seemed surprised by the directness of this question, but Charlotte knew this would very likely be her only chance to learn
all he could tell her about her mother, so she wasn’t holding back. “I . . . cared for her.”
The equivocation of his answer was obvious. “But you didn’t love her.”
“I could have loved her,” he said. “I wanted to love her. I was excited when she came here, thought she was the most beautiful woman
I’d ever seen. I am attracted to Americans,” he confessed with a chuckle. “They are so exuberant, ready to take on the world
as if nothing bad could happen. I am drawn to that confidence—the whole American Dream. It’s real, you know? But she was molto difficile—very difficult. You understand?”
Lilly had already alerted her, but still she asked, “In what way?”
“Like a spoiled child mixed with a bird that cannot be caged. Never fully satisfied. Never at peace. Restless. Always looking
for something better and demanding more of those around her.”
“Selfish?” Charlotte suggested, summing up what he’d just said.
His expression indicated he hated to speak ill of the dead, but she could tell she’d reached the truth.
“I suppose I, too, am selfish,” he said, an acknowledgment Charlotte found quite generous.
“I never wished her any harm. But when it happened, I was ready for her to go back to America and leave me to my life. Being with her was not as I had imagined. I told her so right before . . . right before she got into the accident.”
“What kind of accident was it?” Heidelman hadn’t even been able to tell Charlotte how her mother had died. He’d said he’d
been told only that she’d passed away and he needed to find her next of kin.
“She got angry when I asked her to move out, stormed from the house and took my Vespa. I tried to stop her, but she almost
ran me over as she drove off.” He flung his arm out as he spoke to show his shock, but then his arm returned to his side and
his voice went soft again. “She was only a kilometer away when she swerved to avoid something in the road and . . .”
His words faded away, but Charlotte could easily guess the rest of that sentence. She’d been killed in an accident. “And what?”
“Collided with a bus.”
Charlotte’s fingernails curled into her palms. “Please tell me Lilly didn’t see what happened.”
“No. She was in the other room while we were arguing, doing her schoolwork. She would always disappear when we started to
fight. She hated it, of course. What child wouldn’t? She didn’t even know her mother had left. She had AirPods in when I went
to tell her there’d been an accident and we had to go to the hospital right away.”
“You’re painting a picture of constant emotional upheaval,” Charlotte said. “Is that what it was like for Lilly?”
“I’m a passionate person. Sabrina was a passionate person.”
“So . . . yes.”
“Si,” he finally acknowledged in a fatalistic tone.