Chapter Ten #2
‘Yes,’ Ivy embellished. ‘It was…good. Difficult, but good.’
‘Difficult in what way?’ Ms Quell asked.
‘Every family has their own dynamics. It was always going to be hard, me being English and not quite fitting in. Alessia, Antonio’s mother, made a real effort but…
as much as a marriage does require the support of family and friends, really, if the issue between the two people concerned is irreconcilable… ’ Ivy trailed off in a shrug.
This was the point where Antonio was supposed to interrupt and accuse her of being cold and standoffish with his family, just as they had planned. But he said nothing.
Ms Quell looked between them and Ivy shifted uncomfortably.
‘Did you want to add anything?’ Ivy asked Antonio pointedly.
He looked at her, his gaze mulish. ‘No.’
Now it was Ivy’s turn to get angry. He needed this. He was making her do this.
‘And now you see what I have been dealing with,’ she appealed to Ms Quell. ‘He does this. Just shuts down when he doesn’t get his way.’
‘Well, it’s not as if my way was horrible or difficult,’ Antonio interjected.
‘No. But it was about what suited you. Not me. And I need, sometimes, for things to suit me .’
He glared at her as if that was what he’d been trying to say to her all along and, all of a sudden, she was turning this back on him. ‘That is not fair,’ he accused.
‘Nothing about this is fair,’ she shot back.
‘I have done everything in my power, Ivy. If there was something else, I would try it,’ he insisted, pleading with her with his eyes.
‘And I’ve told you. I understand. I’m not blaming you. There isn’t any blame to give. Not here.’
Ms Quell watched them like a tennis match, back and forth, over the net of a subtext she didn’t understand and perhaps didn’t need to.
‘I don’t think we gave this enough time,’ Antonio said, shocking both her and Ms Quell, but perhaps not in equal measure.
‘What do you mean?’ Ivy demanded, the ground shifting beneath her feet and throwing her off-kilter. He wasn’t playing by the rules. He wasn’t following what they’d agreed to say.
‘I’m just wondering if there was something more we could do?’ he asked, the words forced through his teeth as if he were fighting himself and a whole army of past hurts.
‘You think that there is something more we could do to try and make this marriage work?’ Ivy demanded slowly and succinctly, making sure that she—and Ms Quell—were understanding him correctly.
He thrust a hand through his hair impatiently. ‘Yes? I don’t know,’ he said infuriatingly.
Why was he doing this? They had an agreement.
He was supposed to marry Maria—it was the only way he could help her get what she needed.
Ivy was supposed to go home, back to England, and be happy.
Not battle with this seesawing of emotion, with a future brighter and more beautiful than she could have ever imagined for herself going in and out of focus at Antonio’s whim.
He couldn’t play with her like this. She couldn’t handle it.
Her heart broke beneath the two fractured futures—one of her at home in her flat, and one of her here, with him.
‘You think you might want to give this marriage a go?’ she repeated, forcing him to be clear, the quiver in her voice as much despair as it was anger.
He looked at her, his eyes widening.
It was too much. He couldn’t do this to her. It was a cry from deep within her soul.
‘I have,’ she confessed, ‘spent my entire life loving people who are, in one way or another, too selfish to love me back.’ It was painful to admit, but it was true.
‘My brother. Certainly, my parents,’ she said, her inhale shaky before she continued.
‘I don’t think they did it by choice. Addiction made my brother inescapably selfish and my parents?
’ She bit her lip. ‘I don’t think they actively set out not to love us, not to prioritise us, or care for us like parents should,’ she acknowledged through the pain of a shattering heart.
‘But that’s what happened. My father left and my mother chose someone else’s child over her own.
I can’t do it any more,’ she said, as much to herself as to the others in the room.
‘I can’t keep waiting for someone to choose me.
And I can’t do that with you,’ she declared, turning to Antonio.
‘Do you love me?’ she asked. Because that was why they were here, no?
That was why he was digging his heels in and why her heart was breaking.
And just like that, she was all the versions of herself that had waited for so long, hoping that someone would come for her, hoping that someone would choose her, love her.
He sat, clenched jawed and silent, and glaring at her. If he wanted to he could say yes and end this all right now.
But he didn’t.
Heart shattering into a thousand pieces, Ivy turned to Ms Quell. ‘Is that sufficient?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Ms Quell said with a sad nod of her head.
‘Okay then.’
Antonio watched Ivy stand from the sofa, knowing that it wasn’t because he’d been unable to stop her but that he’d been unwilling to do so. She’d done that. Forced his hand. And he’d made the choice he’d told her he would. He’d chosen family, which was right, wasn’t it?
Vaguely, he was aware of Ms Quell informing him that she would email him the final written assessment to be completed before someone from the judge’s chambers would be in touch with the last court date, which he would have to attend.
But, all being well, his divorce could be finalised before the end of the following week.
He should be elated, but instead he sat there in numb silence, watching Ivy and Ms Quell leave the room together. He didn’t even stand to see them out. He heard their footsteps click across the tiled hallway and out of his life— and he should be pleased.
And he would be, he believed. He just needed to wait until the ringing stopped sounding in his head.
It was high-pitched and oddly like a tension headache, but that couldn’t be, because he had what he wanted, right?
And really, that was only thanks to Ivy.
Because he’d nearly blown the whole damn thing.
‘I don’t think we gave this enough time.’
He let out a bitter laugh for no one to hear. Some last-ditch attempt to slake his insatiable lust for her, perhaps. No more. Surely no more.
‘Do you love me?’
It was a question that was still rattling around his brain three days later as he wandered aimlessly from his office into the kitchen in search of the whisky.
He’d completed the damn paperwork for Judge Carmondy, answering asinine questions like Would you agree with the statement that you have given your all to your marriage?
and Do you recognise that the failings are of equal measure or do you feel otherwise?
which Antonio was half convinced had been asked solely for the purposes of annoying him.
The American deal with the Chinese had gone through.
And he couldn’t bring himself to care. He’d told Maria about the outcome of the assessment and tried to be enthused as she’d thanked him, and when she’d talked about making plans for their wedding he’d told her to go ahead. He’d do whatever was needed.
Agata looked up at him and scowled.
‘C’è qualche problema?’ he demanded.
‘No, signor, nessun problema,’ she said, and left the room muttering about him turning into a neanderthal.
He rubbed at what had been stubble a few days ago and was now the beginnings of a beard. He might keep it. It was easier, after all, than shaving every morning. He reached for a glass and filled it with ice.
‘We’re out of whisky,’ he shouted after Agata.
‘Lo so!’ she yelled back.
Antonio frowned, wondering why his housekeeper had become so intractable all of a sudden. If she’d known they were out of whisky, why hadn’t she bought a new bottle?
He put the empty one on the counter and opened the wine fridge to extract a bottle.
‘It’s a little early for that, isn’t it?’
He closed his eyes and slowly closed the fridge door.
‘Ciao Mamma,’ he said, forcing a smile to his lips.
‘Don’t Ciao Mamma me,’ she replied, coming to clip him round the back of the head and pull him into a hug at the same time. Usually, he had his wits about him and would have successfully navigated his way out of both, but he was being unusually slow at the moment.
His mother had a package in her hand that she put on the table.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, aiming for congenial rather than the petulance he felt the full force of at the moment.
‘You haven’t been answering my calls.’
‘For a day—’
‘For three days. And I know I didn’t raise you to be that disrespectful, you ungrateful brat.’
‘Mamma—’
Her hands bracketed his face as she angled it to peer at him, cutting off his complaint.
‘You don’t need any more to drink,’ she decided for him, and released him, only to put the wine back in the fridge and the empty whisky bottle in the bin. ‘Open that while I fix you something to drink,’ she ordered.
He peered at the package. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. It was on the side table when I came in.’
He looked at the address and noticed that it had come from England. The return address, South West London.
Ivy .
Even while he calculated the risks of opening this in front of his mother, his fingers had already slipped beneath the seal and torn open the package.
A note slipped out from a stack of printed photographs.
For you
There was no signature, no other words. Nothing that could be read, obsessed over, analysed. Her handwriting was prettily sloped and he stared at it like a lovesick teenager.
His mother put down a glass of water beside him and picked up the silky photographs that he’d not even spared a glance at yet.
‘ Oh …’
The word slipped from his mother in surprise and he peered over her shoulder to see the image she was looking at. It was from the party. Of him, his mother and Maria all laughing together.
One by one she leafed through the pictures, all beautiful, intimate moments captured perfectly by Ivy’s skill and masterful eye.
‘I saw her with the camera, but I didn’t expect…
I didn’t think…’ His mother trailed off as she gazed at one of Maria talking to her father, with Micha looking on in the background—the look on his face unfathomable.
‘Hmm,’ she said, before turning to the last one.
The picture Ivy had taken of him in the glade, the day before she’d left.
‘Oh, Antonio,’ she said, turning to him.
But all his attention was on the photographs.
‘She said that this was how she saw the world,’ he explained as he looked at picture after picture. They were good. Really good. There was a picture of him with the old couple laughing from the lace stall at the market. And once he reached the end, he went back to the beginning again.
‘What are you looking for?’ his mother asked.
He was about to say that he didn’t know, but then he realised that he did. He was looking for a picture of her. But she wasn’t in any of them.
He shook his head, thinning his lips purposely to stop them from trembling with an unnamed emotion.
She took the pictures back from him and looked at them sadly.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘You say this is how she sees the world?’
‘Sì.’
‘Then what do these pictures tell you?’ she asked.
He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
His mother looked at him pityingly. ‘You. You’re in nearly every single one of these pictures. You are that world.’
That sudden realisation shot a sliver of pain so deep into his heart, he struggled to catch his breath.
Oddio .
He heaved a breath in, and his mother began to look panicked.
‘Antonio, please, you’re scaring me,’ she cried. ‘Talk to me, tesoro .’
‘I can’t afford to love her, Mamma,’ he said, the confession wrenched deep from within his heart.
‘Why not, Antonio?’
‘There is nothing equal to her love. Nothing valuable enough that I could ever give her in return.’
‘ Mio cuore ,’ his mother said, ‘in all the years I’ve loved you and cared for you, I’ve not once wanted anything in return.
You may have thought I did, you may have pre-empted what you thought might be a request, but I’ve never wanted anything other than your happiness.
You’ve bought me a house, jewellery, clothes, holidays—things I don’t want, because all I want is for you to be happy,’ she said with tears gathering in her eyes.
‘It breaks my heart that you think love is an exchange. I wish I’d never taken a thing from you if I taught you such a thing. ’
‘No, Mamma, it wasn’t you,’ he said, unable to bear the tears she shed.
‘I’ll never forgive my husband for not being the man I thought he was. But Ivy is nothing like him. I saw that at the party and I see it with these. You are enough. You,’ she said, holding him with a fierce grip, ‘are equal to her love. Just give her yourself. That is all she needs.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because it’s all I ever needed from you and I love you more than life itself.’
Antonio’s heart thundered in his chest at his mother’s words, from her love. From the fear of taking the risk to open his heart and hope that perhaps he was worthy of love without condition or transaction. That he might just be enough by himself.
But he’d let her go. He’d seen how devastated Ivy had been as she’d asked him if he loved her. He knew what asking that had cost her and he’d forced her to do it.
‘What have I done?’
‘Nothing you can’t undo, figlio mio .’
Dio mio , he hoped his mother was right.