Chapter Ten
CHAPTER TEN
V ICTORIA WAS SPELLBOUND . When she’d watched this musical all those months ago, her vision had been obscured and she’d been sat so high up and so far back the cast really had seemed as small as ants. She’d also kept her phone clutched in her hand, surreptitiously checking it every five minutes. When Marcello had asked her back to the office, she’d told herself she was furious with him for calling her away on something so whimsical, but now she could admit the truth to herself—she’d been waiting for it. Hoping for it. By the time her phone had silently vibrated with his call, she’d already planned her escape route to take it without disturbing the other theatregoers.
This time, she kept her phone in the gold clutch bag that had been in another of the gold boxes Marcello had surprised her with, and watched on a seat so good it was as if she could reach out and touch the stage. Maybe if her hand weren’t so tightly clasped in Marcello’s she would have tried.
To Marcello’s surprise, he thoroughly enjoyed the show. Victoria’s joy would have made it worthwhile for its own sake, but the songs were catchy and the plot good enough to keep his interest.
When things had settled between them and they’d slipped back into the old rhythm of their lives, he would take her to another Broadway show. They would go as the friends they’d been from the start. He knew it would take time to find that old rhythm but they would find it. They had to.
But not yet. Tonight they were enjoying Broadway as lovers.
Outside, the snow was falling again, and when they climbed into the back of his waiting car for the short drive to the restaurant he’d booked them to dine at, fat flakes clung like sparkling diamonds in her hair before melting into a glisten and vanishing.
Palming her cold cheek, he leaned his face into hers and thought he would never be able to endure seeing the sparkle in her eyes vanish, not when they shone with such brilliance as they did now. ‘Go on, tell me, how many times have you already seen it?’ he murmured.
She grinned. ‘Four times. How did you guess?’
‘Your singing along to every word was the giveaway.’
Both laughing, they kissed, a short kiss because their short drive had ended.
Marcello watched for a reaction when she recognised the name of the restaurant, and experienced a surge of gratification when the sparkle in her eyes intensified. Famed for its fresh atmosphere and even fresher seafood, something he knew she had a deep and abiding love for, he’d selected this place with Victoria’s desires at the forefront of his mind.
Thinking there was a very real danger she could burst from happiness, Victoria felt like a celebrity when they were whisked up the steps and welcomed into what she could only describe as a sophisticatedly funky interior. Evening coats taken—her Merino wool coat had been another surprise from Marcello—they were swept off to a corner table. Water poured, drink order taken, a limoncello vodka martini for Victoria, a dirty vodka, whatever that was, for Marcello, and then they were left alone with their menus.
Immediately, she leaned her face over her menu to confide, ‘I looked at bringing Sheena here for her birthday last summer but couldn’t get a reservation for love nor money.’ She’d been snootily informed the restaurant had a fourteen-month waiting list. ‘She is going to be green when I tell her I’ve been.’
‘You should have told me—I could have got the two of you in.’
‘Don’t ever tell Sheena that.’ Not that he would ever meet her. Not now. Marcello didn’t know it but this wasn’t just their last night together. This was the beginning of their end, something she was resolutely not allowing herself to think about. He’d gone to so much effort that it would be cruel to ruin the evening by letting her emotions get the better of her. There would be plenty of time for that when she broke the news to him. Let them have this one last night and part with the best memories of each other.
He grinned. ‘How do you know Sheena? Did you meet at Columbia?’
‘No, after Columbia. We lived together for a while. I was looking for a new place to live and she was looking for a new roommate. Mutual friends facilitated it and introduced us. They were convinced that as we’re both Irish we were bound to know each other because obviously everyone from Ireland knows each other.’
His grin widened. ‘I used to get that when I first moved here. Anyone with a first-generation Italian friend was certain we must have spent our childhoods together.’
‘Do you know what the best bit is?’
His eyes gleamed. ‘Tell me.’
‘It turned out that Sheena and I did kind of know each other. Our mothers used to work for the same accountancy firm!’
Oh, how she loved Marcello’s laughter at this, loved how when their drinks arrived he held his aloft so she could clink hers to it, loved how he urged her to try his and loved even more his laughter when she pulled a disgusted face—who put olive juice in a vodka, for heaven’s sake?—at its offensive taste.
‘Your tastebuds are warped,’ she informed him.
‘So you don’t want to share the seafood platter, then?’ he teased.
It was after they’d finished their first course, were on their third round of drinks and helping themselves to the enormous tray heaped with clams, oysters, tuna crudo, jumbo shrimps and lobster that had been delivered to their table, that he said, ‘Do you know, I have never asked what brought you to America?’
She looked up at him, startled by the observation. ‘Haven’t you?’
He shook his head. ‘I just assumed you had followed the American dream like most other people who emigrate here.’
The look that passed between them conveyed perfectly well that it didn’t need to be said that Marcello had turned his back on a nightmare rather than follow a dream.
‘I did have that dream,’ she admitted, squeezing lemon juice over the seafood she’d piled onto her plate. ‘But it wasn’t the dream of making a pot of money. It was the freedom New York promised that drew me.’
‘What kind of freedom were you seeking?’
‘All kinds. I’m from a small town with a small high street where all the shops close at five and the only night life are pubs where the only activities are games of darts and table skittles, and the music comes from twenty-year-old jukeboxes. New York seemed to promise everything I thought I was missing out on. The city that never sleeps? I wanted that, thank you very much.’
Marcello laughed and plucked a fat chip from the metal basket piled with them. ‘That aspect drew me too. Did you not consider moving to an Irish city or to England?’
‘All my favourite films were set in New York so for me it was a no-brainer. I couldn’t believe it when I was accepted into Columbia. I only chose business on a whim because I couldn’t think of anything else.’
‘You were eighteen?’
‘I’d just turned nineteen.’
He thought of himself at nineteen. He’d gone to university in Bologna, a four-hour drive from his family home in Rome. His parents had visited every other weekend armed with cases of freshly laundered clothes, which they’d swapped for the mounds of dirty clothes he’d piled all over his cramped room.
Where he’d been happily spoilt and cosseted by adoring parents, Victoria had fought to be seen by hers. Moving to New York meant Victoria had been on her own. In the eighteen months she’d worked for him, not a single member of her family had flown out to visit her.
‘That must have been daunting.’
‘It was terrifying ,’ she agreed gleefully.
‘And your family? What did they think of you leaving? Were they proud?’ He hoped as hard as he’d ever hoped for anything that they were.
‘They were delighted for me. I became the golden Cusack they could all brag about to their friends and casually drop into conversation about my life in The Big Apple.’ The gleefulness in her voice faded. ‘It took me leaving to make them actually remember my name.’
That was one thing he would never understand. He supposed in big families like the Cusacks, it was all too easy for one of them to feel lost within it. Marcello’s extended family was big, but when he was growing up, his immediate family had been just the four of them, their parents spoiling and cosseting Benito as much as they’d done him.
He found himself having to swallow a sudden lump in his throat. ‘Do you miss them?’
‘Not as much as I would without the technology we have. I’m in all the family group chats and stuff but...’ She gave a small shrug. ‘It’s silly but I still feel excluded. It’s my own fault, I know. I chose to move across the Atlantic and live in a different time zone from them. But they answer each other’s posts within minutes, sometimes seconds whereas mine are often left hanging. The only one who always responds to mine is Grandma.’
Victoria gave a wistful shake of her head and tried to pull herself together and not let the despondency she’d worked so hard to smother that evening leach out. ‘I told you I’m being silly. It’s always great when I go home and we have such a lovely time together. I guess I just wish it didn’t feel like they forget me the minute I’m out of their sight.’
But as she said this, she realised that since working for Marcello, the sting of it had lost its needle precision. Her visits home had been happier occasions for her, not just because she no longer felt lost in the crowd of Cusacks but because she was happier and more confident in her own skin. And all because one man had seen something in her that had left a lasting impression.
Marcello had remembered her.
‘I can tell you this much, bella ,’ he said. ‘When you were ill, I nearly suffered a burst eardrum from all the calls I kept receiving from them.’
She spluttered a short burst of laughter at the imagery.
His smile was soft. ‘I cannot pretend to understand the dynamics of your family but I know they love you.’
She returned the smile. ‘I know they do. I guess it’s all a continuation of how things were for me growing up. My voice always got lost.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘I probably should have shouted louder to make myself heard. That’s what the others did.’
‘If you did not have your voice there, I would say that you have found it here.’
‘Do you think?’
‘There is not a person in the Guardiola Group who would dare ignore your voice.’
‘You make me sound like a dragon!’
Laughing, he shook his head and cut into his tuna. ‘No one thinks that. People listen to you because you have proven that you’re worth listening to. You organise your thinking the same way you organise my life.’
‘Thank you... I think.’
‘ Bella , it is not just me who values and respects you. The whole workforce does.’
The tears she’d been fighting so hard to hold back suddenly brimmed as the life she’d enjoyed since arriving in New York flashed through her. The good friends she’d made. The great social life she’d enjoyed even if it had ground to a halt since working for Marcello. But that was her own fault too. She saw that now. She’d let him make outrageous demands on her personal time because, even when she was miffed with him, there was no one in the world in whose company she’d rather be.
Because of Marcello, she’d found a career to thrive in and was paid generously for it. For all that she’d often thought of herself as his glorified dogsbody, he’d taught her more about business than any number of degrees could have. He’d made it no secret that he was grooming her to one day take a seat on his board, a seat in her own right and not just as his Woman Friday.
At twenty-five, she’d built the life her bored, insecure teenage self would have thrilled for.
Tomorrow, she would take a sledgehammer to it.
Today she had everything. A great career. Disposable income. A decent apartment to live in. A love affair more fulfilling and consuming than she could ever have dreamed possible.
Tomorrow it would all be gone.
‘ Bella? What is wrong?’
She looked back into the eyes she loved more than anyone’s in the whole world and knew that in the morning she would be taking a sledgehammer to Marcello’s world too, even if it was a much smaller one.
But tomorrow hadn’t arrived yet. They still had these last few hours together and she wouldn’t spoil them for anything.
With a soft sigh, she said, ‘I was just thinking my teenage self would approve of how my life has turned out.’
Shoulders relaxing, he raised his glass. ‘We should drink to that.’
‘As long as I don’t have to drink that evil stuff in your glass,’ she managed to quip.
His answering laugh helped smother the despondency back to where she could keep it hidden and contained from them both for their last few hours together.
Marcello’s eyes were wide open in the early morning darkness. He wasn’t sure if he’d slept at all. Too many thoughts crowding his head in the lulls between lovemaking.
Nestled beside him, her hand a deadweight on his abdomen, a strand of her long hair tickling his arm, Victoria.
The dream-like bubble of the past week was coming to an end. Soon, he would have to wake her. They needed to shower and then head to her apartment so she could change into her work clothes before they went into the office and reminded the staff of what they looked like.
He hadn’t had so much time off work since Tommaso.
It had been a difficult birth. Livia had suffered. But then their perfect baby had been born and happiness had suffused her. Suffused them both. The purest kind of love. The three of them, his little family. A whole life together to be lived.
In the blink of an eye it had all gone and the purity of his love had turned into a grief so unbearable the pain had made him want to die.
Work had been his salvation. He’d returned to the small building that had homed his then small empire the day after they’d laid Tommaso to rest. He’d taken only rare days off since. His annual visit to his parents’ home for Christmas was always calculated to last no more than four days, including travelling. Work hard. Play hard. Exhaust the mind and body. Leave no time for thoughts or feelings.
His thoughts now refused to switch off but, without any forethought, he slipped out of bed and headed silently to his dressing room, closing the door before switching the light on so the brightness didn’t wake Victoria.
Behind his rails of shirts, he unlocked the hidden safe he kept his more expensive valuables in. He didn’t possess many of them. He’d never been one for status symbols. A handful of ridiculously expensive watches, a signet ring he always felt like a mafia boss wearing, a few pairs of diamond cufflinks too expensive to go into the cufflink drawer, and his grandmother’s engagement ring.
‘You’re the only one left who can use it,’ his grandfather had said when he’d given it to him over Christmas. Meaning Marcello was the only one of his grandchildren unmarried, something his mother, who’d abandoned any subtlety of her hope that Marcello remarry this past year, had no doubt put in his mind.
If he hadn’t respected his grandfather so greatly, and if he hadn’t understood his well-meant intention, Marcello would have reminded him that he was unmarried because he was divorced and that the scars from what he and Livia had been through meant he would never marry again.
The ghost of Livia’s voice echoed through the walls from the last time he’d seen her.
Then why did you come here?
He was still no closer to an answer. No closer, either, to understanding why he’d agreed to the keynote speech in Rome. He’d refused his brother’s four previous requests so why accept this one? Why put himself through the pain of returning to the city of his darkest days when he didn’t need to?
And why was he standing in his dressing room staring at a ring? He didn’t know why he’d felt compelled to look at it. Didn’t understand the hollowness of his mood or the brooding nature of his thoughts.
Exhaling through his nose, he locked the safe back up and moved his shirts back into place to cover it, then turned out the dressing room light and gazed at Victoria through the dim moonlight pouring through the windows. She’d turned over and huddled deeper into the duvet.
His next exhale was a fight against his own airwaves.
He’d let her sleep a little longer.
Showered, still trying to make sense of his thoughts and feelings, Marcello selected his suit, then rifled through his ties. The hot water had done him the world of good and washed away much of the strange mood that had clung to him. He’d figured out, too, what had caused it. It was all the talk and thoughts about Tommaso. The grief he usually kept compartmentalised had risen these last few days. Longer really. He’d thought about his son more in recent times than he usually ever allowed himself.
Victoria was still asleep.
He watched her from the bedroom door as he’d done a short while earlier from his dressing room, a fresh weight forming in his guts.
This would be the last time he saw her like this.
He closed his eyes and breathed out the pain.
It had to be this way.