Chapter One #2
She was captivated. As powerless to resist as a moth to the phototactic pull of a flame. Which was why she was still standing there, frozen, mesmerised as he stopped in front of her, his dark coat flecked with glittering droplets of water, a cup of coffee in his outstretched hand.
She should have run a mile. An ultramarathon.
But instead, she had shared a taxi with him to a hotel in the South Pigalle. They had booked into separate rooms but by the following morning she had given him the ultimate power to hurt her. She had given him her heart.
And now, after years of silence and attrition, Ettore was back.
She breathed in sharply, and the jarring improbability of meeting him here, now, was as shocking as if he had upended a bucket of ice-cold water over her head.
She wasn’t expecting this. Him. Ettore.
More disconcertingly she wasn’t expecting to feel a sudden and disconcertingly fierce flicker of heat flare up inside her as if she were a match striking against powdered glass.
Which was why she was still forming sentences in her head when he stopped in front of her, his striking light-coloured eyes resting on her face. Except that now there was a coolness there that jarred almost as much as the handmade leather shoes and the gold signet ring on his pinkie finger.
He had always dressed well. She had teased him about it when they were together. But back then they were equals. Now, she was working as a lab technician and a cleaner to pay her bills, and he had clearly moved up a level.
‘Hello, Dulcie.’
She flinched inside. Hello, Dulcie? Seriously? Her heart jerked against her ribs as his words reverberated inside her head.
The last time he had spoken to her had been to ask her to choose between himself and her brother. Correction: he had made her choose. Even though she had begged him not to. But he had been insistent, a cold-eyed stranger.
So, she had chosen Oscar. How could she not?
Ettore hadn’t tried to change her mind. He had simply turned and walked away.
Because he could. Because he was looking for a reason to walk away.
Because what they shared was not, as she’d thought, the real thing, but a mistake.
He hadn’t thought it worth his time to elaborate as to which of those explanations was correct.
Hadn’t thought Dulcie worthy of an explanation.
He was too busy rewriting history, assigning the responsibility for their failed relationship to her.
And then he was gone. Because men like Ettore Marchesi and her father didn’t own their failures.
They lied and twisted the situation so that up was down.
Black was white. Look at how her father had twisted the facts about her mum not wanting her.
By the time she had learned the truth her mum was dead and Oscar was on a path to chaos and addiction.
‘Her situation has changed,’ he’d said. ‘There’s no place for you in her life any more.’
She had thought her mum had remarried. And her dad had never contradicted her.
The truth was that her mum had been drying out in a clinic.
But her father hadn’t wanted to tell her that because then he would have had to tell her that Oscar was in care, and she would have wanted her brother to come and live with them instead.
Finding that out, she had felt like a bird hitting a window. She had been stunned, confused, scared.
Watching Ettore leave, she had felt like that same bird having its wings torn off. She had been stunned, wounded. Terrified of losing him for ever. But she hadn’t gone after him. Then again, he hadn’t returned. So, they were even, kind of.
No, they weren’t, she thought savagely a moment later. They weren’t even close.
Tilting up her chin, she met his gaze. ‘What are you doing here?’
His light brown eyes glinted beneath the overhead lights but there was no softness there as he stared down at her.
‘What, no “hi, there”, no “how have you been?” or “it’s good to see you”?’ he said slowly. ‘That’s not much of a welcome.’
She glared at him. ‘If you wanted a parade, you should have called me. Oh, but you haven’t called, have you? Not once in two years. Not ever.’
‘To be fair, you changed your number. And your name. Whose name is it, by the way?’
His expression didn’t alter but there was a husky softness to his voice that made her shiver.
He was annoyed, confused, angry even. And she could see why he would feel all and any of those emotions.
When she and Ettore met, she was called Turner, but after he walked out on her she was done with taking the name of yet another man with a twisted world view of what love and loyalty should look like.
She and Oscar had chosen the name Shaw together because she wanted there to be a connection that was theirs alone.
To reassure him that she wasn’t going anywhere.
Although she’d rather gouge out her own eyes than share those facts with Ettore.
‘It’s mine. Not that it’s any of your business.’
‘It is if you’re committing bigamy.’
Her pulse thudded in her throat. She stared at him in disbelief.
Had he erased their disastrous marriage from his brain?
Did he really think she could just pick out a new life with some other man and carry on living it concurrently with this one?
‘You have to be joking. The last thing on my mind is another trip down the aisle, even with the added thrill of breaking the law at the same time. But given that you’ve managed to track me down, I’m guessing you already know I’m not committing bigamy. How did you find me, by the way?’
He shrugged, and it was annoying on so many levels that he was the only person who could lift his shoulders like that without looking like some sulky adolescent.
‘Everyone can be found, Dulcie. It’s not that hard.’
Could they? She felt a pang of guilt. After she’d found that correspondence between her father and the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, and realised that Oscar had been in care, she had tried to find him.
But for her, at least, it had been a frustrating and time-consuming process.
Hating him for instantly and unknowingly diminishing her, she scowled. ‘You know what else isn’t hard? Crawling back under whatever rock you’ve been living under.’
Ettore’s eyes narrowed, and she felt the provocation of that remark ripple through him and beyond him into the sunlit street. But he didn’t lose his temper. Instead, he stared at her assessingly, as if she were a painting he was thinking about buying.
‘You have a choice.’ His tone was pleasant but there was no mistaking the steel and warning in his voice. ‘We can stand here trading childish insults or we can go somewhere more private and talk like adults.’
‘If you came here to talk, you’ve wasted your time,’ she said, breezily, her gaze fixed on the door to the street outside, and freedom from Ettore and his unexpected, unwelcome presence.
‘There’s nothing to talk about because, as far as I’m concerned, nothing has changed since we last met.
’ She sidestepped past him and pushed open the door, blinking into the sunlight.
In relation to their marriage, that was true.
But some things had changed. She had bought a new house, a tiny two-up two-down that the estate agent had called a ‘doer-upper’.
So far, she had not done much to it other than paint the walls, but it had its own front door and a garden.
On a less positive note, she had lost her job and become a nun, albeit unofficially.
‘You’re right. It hasn’t.’
Ettore was walking beside her now, matching his stride to hers, and she wanted to scream but Oscar had already been given a warning for causing a disturbance. The last thing he needed was for his sister to end up at the police station too.
‘Do you mind?’ She spun round to face him and instantly regretted it because it hurt, it hurt in a visceral way to look at him.
‘We’re still husband and wife.’
The tight focus of his gaze made her feel suddenly breathless, and then poundingly furious with herself for being so susceptible to what she knew better than anyone was just words.
They were husband and wife. She knew that, obviously, and yet hearing him say it out loud in this narrow, high-walled street within earshot of several complete strangers made her feel suddenly light-headed.
Easing back into the shadows of the college wall, she pressed her hand casually against the cool stone to steady herself and then shrugged.
‘We’re separated. We’ve been separated for two years.’
‘Which is why I want to talk to you about our marriage.’
For a moment she couldn’t breathe.
So that was why he was here. He wanted a divorce.
And why would he want a divorce? She could think of only one reason, and despite herself, despite how badly she wanted not to care, the knowledge that Ettore had found someone else, someone to take her place, made a lump of misery swell in her throat.
If only she had got her act together and ambushed him on some Italian side street. Catching him off guard and making him feel small and stupid and superfluous. He had walked out of her life two years ago. So, why hadn’t she done so?
Why hadn’t she tracked him down and demanded a divorce?
Her throat tightened. It was a simple enough question, but the answer was a little more complicated.
At first, his leaving hadn’t felt real. Shock had paralysed her.
Then she’d waited, hoping, yearning for him to get in touch.
Which of course he hadn’t. Hope had faded, to be replaced by an anger and a despair that had scared her with their intensity and magnitude and so she had buried her feelings, buried the past. Which was easier than it sounded because nobody knew she was married, not even Oscar.
Now though, Ettore had turned up with a spade and started digging.
‘If by talking about our marriage, you mean ending it, you could have just emailed. I would have got around to it myself sooner or later, but our marriage was over so quickly I forgot all about it.’
He didn’t like that, she thought, watching his eyes narrow, but, hey, cry me a river and screw him.
‘But that’s the point. I don’t want to forget about it.’
His eyes grazed her face, watching her reaction. She had loved that before. That he had been so focused on her, so attuned to the infinitesimal shifts in her body and mood. Now though, she hated it. Worse, she was confused. ‘I don’t understand—’
‘I didn’t come here to get a divorce, Dulcie. I came here to remind you that we are still married.’
The simplicity of that statement sent shivers down her spine. Now she was even more confused. She crossed her arms, to stop the feeling that she was unravelling in the street.
‘Why would you come all this way to remind me of that?’
There was a pause, and she got the feeling that Ettore was processing a dozen answers to that question.
‘Because,’ he said, at last, ‘I believe it would be in both our interests for us to stay married. Not like this. Not living in different countries. But under one roof. I want you to come back to Italy with me. To Puglia.’