CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER SEVEN
Next to dreamy , breathtaking Venice, London was a grim, gray sprawl of concrete and exhaust.
It was well into May now, and the weather was often pretty, but it still felt gloomy to Irinka. She walked to the Tube in the morning, paying no attention to the hints of spring flowers in boxes and gardens along the way. And it was often a bright, happy sort of evening on her walk home, but to her it might as well have been storming down pellets of rain on her head.
Maybe it was fairer to say she couldn’t tell the difference.
There were clients to soothe in the wake of so many canceled appoints, each of them with a vast male ego that required she cater to them as if they were the only man alive—the sort of thing that Irinka normally did on autopilot. But she’d left that particular skill behind in the Grand Canal, it seemed.
Because try as she might, she couldn’t seem to find the will to return those calls. She couldn’t even listen to the usual outraged messages, because the sort of men she worked for were always ruffled and stroppy until they felt appropriately catered to, and she simply didn’t have it in her to murmur encouragingly and make assenting noises until they decided they’d shouted long enough.
This was not a problem she’d ever had before.
It was almost as if she’d come back home as someone else.
One night Irinka walked back from Notting Hill Gate. She walked and walked, and only noticed that she’d sailed past her own front door when she found herself tramping about in North Kensington. The part of North Kensington that only dreamed it was Ladbroke Grove. When she finally noticed that she was taking herself on an impromptu walking tour, it was the better part of a half-hour’s walk back to her own front door.
“So you took a holiday in Venice,” Auggie said at a Work Wives lunch one day, purportedly so they could gather and discuss work, but mostly to celebrate the fact they were all back in London at the same time. A rare occurrence these days. “And yet you look like you need a holiday to recover from your holiday.”
“Doesn’t everyone?” Irinka asked dryly.
“Perhaps not quite so much of a holiday, then,” Auggie murmured.
But Irinka ignored her. She tried to focus on the others, because she didn’t need reminding that these sorts of nights were rare. Back at university, there had been nothing but time. Long nights piled into common rooms or loafing about in each other’s rooms in halls. Dreaming up glorious futures at the local, dancing madly in the discos for each other’s entertainment more than anything else. They’d plotted, planned, dreamed, and they’d done it together.
Irinka knew she wasn’t the only one who viewed these friendships as something more like sisters, taking the place of many of their rather less congenial family relationships.
Or maybe that was just her.
And in any case, it would only get more rare to have the four of them together now.
Because her friends were happy. They were in love, and it was the kind of love that made each of them better . She could see it in the way they all…inhabited their own skin differently than they had before. Maude was talking about landscape architecture with a smile on her face. Lynna held forth on her strong opinion that pies should be savory, not sweet, but she was laughing as if she’d finally decided it was okay to be a little silly, if she liked.
It was Auggie who kept watching Irinka’s face, as if she was that close to giving herself away. And the mad part was that Irinka couldn’t tell. All her friends were more authentically themselves than ever, loved up and gleaming, and she felt as if she’d had to put on a costume to play the role of herself today.
Like all her bones had been rearranged in Venice and she still didn’t know how they worked.
Auggie tuned back into the conversation, which had something to do with Lynna’s disdain for the pub’s lofty menu and Maude’s stinging critique of the herbaceous border and shrubs, which Auggie claimed meant they might need to ascend to a wine bar next time.
“Maybe we are no longer the sort of women who pile into a pub on a Friday and get the pints in,” Auggie said.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Maude said with a laugh.
And Irinka decided that the strange emptiness she was feeling was actually freedom.
Not everybody got to revisit a defining, disfiguring love affair that had altered her life once already. The real madness was imagining that she might come out of it unscathed, just because it had been less of a bitter, acrimonious ending this time.
Not everyone got to go back to the scene of the crime that had broken her heart and repair it.
Because she was absolutely repaired, she assured herself. Stitched up and made new.
She smiled when everyone looked her way and leaned in, dropping her voice. “Guess what scandalous, outrageous gossip I heard only yesterday about a selection of minor nobles we may or may not have met at university.”
Irinka decided that the only thing that was required of her was to enjoy this lovely late evening in an outdoor pub garden that regrettably did not meet Maude’s standards, gathered around the picnic table until well after dark.
And sitting there spinning stories for her friends felt right—like she was finally fitting back into her body, and her life.
“Why do you seem sad?” Auggie asked later, as she and Irinka broke away from the other two and headed toward a different Tube stop.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Auggie laughed and bumped Irinka’s shoulder with hers. “You forget, I was there when you came back from Venice that summer after university. You look like that again, pale and wobbly.”
“I’m not the least bit wobbly.” Irinka made herself smile. “I’m not even wearing treacherous heels.”
“Repeatedly saying that you’re not a thing when I can see with my own eyes that you are doesn’t change it,” Auggie observed.
Irinka stopped walking and faced her friend, waiting for a rumbling double-decker coach to go by. “I appreciate that you’re looking out for me,” she said quietly. “Really. But I’m fine. You don’t need to save me from anything. Not even myself.”
Auggie gazed back at her, but a bit too shrewdly for Irinka’s taste. “You do know,” she said, almost carefully, “that the great mystery of Irinka Scott-Day might be why you get attention wherever you go, but it isn’t why we love you, right?”
Irinka thought she would have preferred if Auggie had taken out a dagger and stabbed her straight through the heart. It hurt to smile, but she made herself do it.
“It’s been a lovely night,” she said. She gave her friend a hug, and she meant it, but then she turned and strode off, leaving Auggie standing there.
No doubt burning holes into her back with her glare, but that was better than carrying on with that conversation.
Irinka was grateful when she made it back to Notting Hill, and did not wander off in a daze this time. She made her way through the throngs crowding in along the Portobello Road, reveling in the mild weather and the hints of the summer ahead.
She wanted to find that kind of hopefulness. She wanted to tilt her head back and spin around, or do whatever it was actually free and unfettered people did in these circumstances.
But instead, she walked to her door and looked around—a bit longingly—to see if there were any black SUVs lingering at the curb, dispatched on strict orders to redo her kidnap. There were none. Only the usual drunks singing in the streets and the sound of traffic in the distance.
Feeling let down all over again, Irinka let herself inside.
She’d loved this little house on sight. It was one of the smallest terraced houses in this stretch of the road and like many of the others, had been falling apart until the 1980s or so, and was now valued at an extraordinary price. Buying it had felt the way she thought freedom should, because it was the first place that was entirely her own. Not one of her mother’s flats or house shares, and happily purchased with her father’s court-mandated settlement to make her love it even more.
Irinka thought that keeping the double-barreled surname that forever linked her to him, shaming him every time she signed her name or was mentioned in a news item, had been a lovely punishment for the Duke. But she also enjoyed living off his begrudging support, too.
A better person would be humiliated to take forced charity, the Duke had said to her once.
You mean, like the rest of your children? Irinka had replied. Thanks, Dad.
And over the years, she’d taken great delight in making the little house her own. She loved that it was small, suitable for only one person if that person truly wished to be comfortable. Or possibly a couple, if that couple got along well. There was room for guests, but only the sort who did not intend to stay too long.
Because Irinka had made every room hers.
She bought art from the stalls in the Portobello Market. She liked to haunt the galleries in Notting Hill, finding things she liked from emerging artists. Whenever she traveled, she liked to pick something up wherever she landed, so that the house was an eclectic mix of all the things that made her happy.
But tonight she stood just inside her door, breathing in her space the way she liked to do, and it hit her that it was all just… things .
She didn’t know why she’d never noticed that before. She had a lot of stuff, but it was just that. Stuff. No different from all the statuary scattered about the palazzo in Venice.
But Irinka was absolutely not thinking about Zago.
Back in her kitchen, she set about toasting some bread, slathering it with butter and a bit of Marmite. Then she took her plate and a cup of tea up through the house to the tiny little rooftop deck that was half the reason she’d bought the house.
She sat outside in her favorite chair, crunching on her toast and waiting for a sense of peace to take her over, but it didn’t come.
Instead, she could see Zago’s dark amber gaze on the day she’d left. She’d promised herself that she would walk away from him without looking back, and she’d made it down that long, stone path. She’d worn the clothes she’d come in, though without her mobile stuck in her boot this time. And with every step, she’d assured herself that she was doing the right thing.
The only thing.
She’d climbed into the water taxi that he’d called for her, and that was when she’d looked back.
Like she wanted to give Orpheus a run for his money, she’d turned and looked.
Zago had been standing on that balcony again, his hands braced on the rail, his face expressionless.
But she’d felt the burn of his gaze like a torch.
It still woke her at night.
And even now, she felt heavy. Out of sorts, which she could admit was just another form of wobbly .
Maybe the real truth was that she’d expected Zago to fight her when she’d told him she wanted to go.
Up on the roof of her little house, Irinka blew out a breath at that.
But at least that was better than a sob.
That same sob that was lodged there behind her ribs like a bruise that never healed.
Irinka decided that she’d had enough of sitting out there as the night grew colder and London clanged all around her. She finished her tea and then she went back inside. It was odd to walk around her little house now, suddenly overly sensitive to all her things , so she tried to shower it off. And the city with it.
Then, still strangely wound up and in no mood to sleep when she knew exactly what would greet her once she crossed over into dreams, she called her mother.
“What is it?” Roksana demanded, not bothering with a greeting. Irinka wasn’t sure she’d even heard a ring. “What has happened?”
“Hello, momochka ,” Irinka said ruefully, already rolling her eyes, because of course she should have expected this reaction. Roksana was always primed for disaster. “Nothing’s happened. I just…wanted to hear your voice.”
There was a pause. Irinka could imagine her mother rising from her bed in her current flat, a modern eyesore of edges and angles and low-slung cubes masquerading as furniture, all courtesy of her latest lover. This one was much younger than her and liked it when Roksana treated him as if he was a naughty puppy.
“At this hour, even I do not wish to hear my voice,” Roksana said after a moment.
This was sentimental for her mother, Irinka knew. It was practically a good cry and a long hug, when most of Irinka’s childhood had been arranged around various ways to toughen her up.
Irinka already regretted the impulse. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I wouldn’t want to disturb your beauty sleep.”
Back when she’d been young, messing with Roksana’s rest had been akin to starting a war. But while her mother still prized her sleep, she was no longer quite so militant.
“Is this a call to merely…catch up?” Her mother sounded baffled. “Have you been at the vodka? Remember what I have always told you. Vodka spoils everything—”
“But the glass,” Irinka finished for her. She sighed, frowning up at her ceiling. “You do know that some daughters call their mothers as a regular thing, don’t you. They actually like to talk to each other on the phone. They’re more like friends, really.”
“I did not raise you to have friends.” Roksana’s voice was cool and untroubled. Irinka could hear her moving around her sterile flat with its commanding views, and wondered if that was happiness. Maybe she’d been getting it wrong all this time. “I raised you to survive under any circumstances, as I have done.”
“But are you happy?” she dared to ask.
Roksana went quiet. So quiet that Irinka lifted her mobile away from her ear to make certain the call had not dropped.
“Are you at risk of bodily harm?” her mother asked after a long pause. “Do you need rescuing? Otherwise there should be no such calls.”
“I don’t know whether to take that as a vote for or against happiness.”
Roksana sighed. “If you chase two hares you will end up with neither,” she said. Her way of saying that a person couldn’t have their cake and eat it, too. “Sleep, Irinka.”
But after her mother rang off, Irinka did not sleep. She found herself thinking a little too much instead, as if her ceiling had transformed itself into a cinema where she could watch what had happened between her and Zago like a film.
She had asked Zago to look at things between them differently, and he had.
Why did she keep coming back to the conclusion that she should have done the same?
Irinka couldn’t answer that. But as she lay there she accepted that leaving him was, in many ways, worse this time. Three years ago she had been so torn apart, so shredded into pieces, that she’d had no choice but to throw herself into absolutely anything that would take her mind off of Venice. That palazzo.
Zago himself.
She was certain that had contributed hugely to her zeal in setting up His Girl Friday with her friends and how she’d managed to round up clients relatively quickly.
But this time around, the thought of storming into anything—much less her client list—made her feel…sordid.
“This too shall pass,” she told herself, and to lull herself to sleep, she decided she would watch nothing but frivolous things until she drifted off to sleep.
A few weeks more of that and she thought she might explode.
“Are you still in the doldrums?” Auggie asked when they ran into each other at the office one day.
A run-in that Irinka suspected Auggie must have planned, because Irinka had gone out of her way to choose a time when no one else was meant to be there.
“I’ve never met a doldrum in my life,” Irinka told her as cheerfully as possible. “I exude happiness, Auggie. Is that not clear?”
“What’s his name?” Auggie asked quietly.
And Irinka felt strung out on some kind of precipice, then. She hadn’t spoken about Zago, ever. Not to anyone.
Because if she did, wouldn’t that make it real?
And once it was real, how was she meant to survive it? She hadn’t had an answer for that three years ago. She didn’t have an answer now.
But it was clear that not speaking about him hadn’t exactly been helpful thus far.
And maybe her friend had meant it when she’d said that it wasn’t Irinka’s mysterious side that she loved. That all her friends loved.
She didn’t have to believe that to wish it was true. And maybe she was weak after all, soft in all the ways she’d been taught not to be, because she went with it.
“His name is Zago Baldissera,” she heard herself say, almost as if someone else had possessed her body to spit out that name.
Auggie blinked. Then she started typing into her mobile and, a moment later, swiveled the screen around so that Irinka was staring directly at a picture of Zago himself.
Zago crossing Saint Mark’s Square in Venice, the basilica rising up behind him. He looked like a dream. A dream she often had, and in far greater detail than this photo.
She sighed. “That’s him.”
And then sat there feeling as if her skin was trying to crawl off her bones as Auggie started reading out facts about Zago.
“Ancient Venetian family. Extraordinary family fortune. A palazzo, no less.” She set her phone down on the desk between them. “Back then, too?”
Irinka didn’t pretend to misunderstand her. “Back then, too.”
“That was your summer of travel.” Auggie frowned as if she was trying to think back those three years. “I don’t even remember the names of those girls you were meant to travel with, off on some sort of Grand Tour.”
Irinka did, and named them. “We all went to the opera in Venice. That’s where I met him. When they moved on toward Croatia, I…stayed.”
She and Auggie sat with that a moment, all the unsaid things that could be packed into that word. Into staying .
“And you went back last month. All these years later.” Auggie frowned. “Why now? What changed?”
Irinka smiled. “That was more of an invitation that couldn’t be refused. What I told you about the brother of a woman who I was hired to brush off is true. It was his sister. I didn’t recognize her, but then, I really never have paid much attention to the women in those scenarios.”
“The women in those scenarios weren’t paying us,” Auggie said, pragmatically.
“Funnily enough that was my argument, too.”
And then Irinka found herself sitting there telling Auggie the entire story of Zago and her, even including her weeks of drudgery.
“You cleaned his house ?” Auggie asked, her eyes round.
“I am nothing if not committed to a role,” Irinka said loftily. “And I rather fancied myself a Cinderella, if I’m honest.”
“And now you’re here.” Her friend crossed her arms and eyed her with something that looked a little too much like pity. “Irinka. You cleaned the man’s house out of some form of malicious compliance because you knew that would get under his skin. You’re sad when you leave him. Last time you built up an entire career arranged around reliving your breakup. Now you can’t even bear to do it.”
“That…is not how I would put it.”
“Is it untrue?” When Irinka couldn’t claim that it was, Auggie nodded. “Then what are you doing in London?”
And that was how, the very next day, Irinka booked herself on a flight and went back to Venice.
Of her own volition, this time.
Once she landed, she found herself a water taxi and had it deliver her straight onto the dock of the palazzo. She marched up the stone path she’d scrubbed on her hands and knees and presented herself at the grand door, smiling at Roderigo when he opened it.
“ La signorina has returned,” he said, not unkindly. But not in a particularly welcoming manner, either. “But without an invitation, I fear.”
Irinka, who did not consider herself particularly impulsive, had actually not considered this part of her impromptu visit. And she should have.
“Will he see me?” she asked.
Because it didn’t occur to her until then that he might not.
So she stood at the bottom of the steps, staring back out at the canal and the boats. She soaked in the impossible splendor of this magical place, this floating city that seemed more dream than reality. She paid attention to the curious way that sound carried, dancing where it shouldn’t and finding ways to sink in so unexpectedly.
And when she thought she heard a faint noise behind her, she turned and he was there.
Zago.
Somehow even more beautiful than when she’d left.
He gazed at her for a long moment, and everything was that amber, that fire. Then he looked past her, out at the water, and it shocked her how much that felt like grief.
After a moment he came down the steps and stood there—near her but not touching her.
Irinka wondered what a picture this made for the tourists passing on the vaporettos , the two of them standing there so awkwardly at the front of an ancient palazzo surrounded by June gardens and polished stone.
It almost made her feel as if she was a part of the sweep of history that sang its way up out of the stones in this place. As if this was all another way of claiming that what burned between them still was destiny.
Almost.
Because wasn’t destiny just another word for surrendering to the things that refused to allow you to control them?
“You don’t seem happy to see me,” she said when she began to worry that she was, in fact, going to turn to stone where she stood.
“Should I be?”
And when Zago turned to look at her then, his amber eyes were blazing hot and that brooding intensity of his seemed to wrap itself around her as surely as if he’d put his hands on her body.
But he didn’t.
There was something almost like sadness on his face, she thought then. Or maybe it was resignation. Whatever it was, it made something in the center of her chest go hollow, then seem to become its own, terrible drum.
“Have you come to stay?” Zago asked her, his voice that silken threat. “For good?”
She balked at that, she couldn’t help it, and he saw it. Irinka watched his eyes track the movement, then shutter.
“For good?” she repeated.
And out there in all that golden light, he reached over and fit his hand to her cheek as he had before. As he had many times before.
It made that hollow drum inside her seem to stretch tight, then shiver into something else. Something she couldn’t name.
“Letting you go gives me no pleasure,” he told her in that dark, low voice. “And I want to welcome you in. But Irinka, there will be no more playing games. When you come back, if you come back, there will be no more half-measures. It’s all or nothing. Are you ready for that?”
He waited, but everything inside of her seemed to seize, then shudder. Hard.
And she couldn’t seem to make her own mouth open.
She couldn’t seem to do anything but stare.
“That’s what I thought.” His thumb stroked her cheekbone.
Once, then again.
And then she stood there, stricken straight through, while Zago climbed the stairs and then closed that grand door behind him.
Leaving her there on the stones with a hollowness where her heart should have been and no earthly idea what she should do next.