4. Elio
The past week had been hell. If Elio hadn’t been advised to head to Italy for legality’s sake, he probably would have made the trip anyway just to avoid the rumors, gossip, and general mayhem that had spread after the party.
Marc had been spot-on about the fallout from this whole thing. Noel Preston had recovered just fine from his choking episode, but he had taken to social media almost immediately, sharing photos of himself in the emergency room and disparaging Elio while he was at it. Apparently, it was Elio’s fault that a pit was left in one of the olives that had been served as part of the canapés. Apparently, it was also Elio’s fault that Preston had seemingly just inhaled the whole thing instead of chewing like a normal person and had thus choked on the pit. And what did you know, apparently he’d swallowed the pit as the waiter gave him the Heimlich, so there was no evidence remaining of the supposed choking hazard. Which was just brilliant.
One thing Elio knew from growing up in high society was that people would latch on to a scandal, no matter how small, like sharks swarming a drop of blood in the water. It was one of the many reasons he didn’t like parties.
He’d caught the next available flight out of New York and headed to Italy, straight to his private island, never more grateful to have dual citizenship in his life. His lawyer was handling the disaster zone that was the frontlines back on U.S. soil, but the man thrived on it, so Elio had no worries for him whatsoever. Marc had instructed him to delete all social media, which he had done promptly and gladly. He wasn’t to answer any phone calls without caller ID, especially any coming from the States, and no personal emails, not that Elio got many of those, only work-related. And if any of those seemed iffy, he wasn’t to open them and, instead, forward them to Marc for clearance. Preston seemed to be on some sort of rampage for justice over a stupid olive pit, and Elio pretty much had to go into hiding to avoid getting sued.
But he would be just fine on his island. Frankly, part of him was happy to have the excuse to sequester himself away instead of staying in New York to do more schmoozing for the Oro launch, even if the weather wasn’t exactly welcoming and looking worse by the second. He had everything he needed to work remotely: staff to take care of the house, the gardens, the kitchen, all of it. If he was going to be driven into exile, there were far worse places to serve his sentence. Though right now, he truly was completely alone. The staff had gone home for the day — far earlier than they normally would have. The storm that had been forecast was on the horizon, and the housekeeper, Gianna, didn’t want to be cut off from the mainland for however long the disaster was going to last. This time of year, it could be a while before a storm like this blew over. Elio sent her off, relieved to know that she would be safe and sound and that he was the only one on this island.
And then, just when he was starting to truly relax for the first time in days, a knock sounded at the door. Well, there went the good mood. At first he ignored it, hoping it was a trick of his increasingly paranoid imagination and sure enough, the sound stopped after another minute. It was probably just the wind throwing some sticks against the door or something. It was certainly starting to pick up out there…
A knock sounded on the glass door that led out into the garden beside the study, and Elio nearly hit the roof with how high he jumped. A woman stood right outside; she was tall, in a plain navy T-shirt, skirt and sneakers, with a cardboard box under her arm. She smiled widely at him as he looked through the glass at her and even waved a little, motioning for him to open the door.
In moments where any sort of threat was evident, flight or fight was supposed to take hold, right? But Elio, his heart still hammering in behind his ribs from the fright she’d given him, was stuck between the two, frozen to the spot and staring with a slack jaw out at the woman.
She wasn’t wearing a uniform, not really. She looked like she’d come from a laid-back sort of office, her hair braided up around her head with random curls being tugged at by the wind. Usually, when Elio had a knock on a side door from a random stranger, they were dressed in coveralls or similar fare with a bag of tools or a rake in hand. But she just looked, well… she looked kind of lovely. Really lovely, actually, and it somehow made this whole situation far stranger.
She rapped her knuckles gently on the glass once again and motioned at the box she was carrying. Elio, despite himself and despite his knowledge of how horror films usually worked, stepped forward and opened the door just enough to poke his head out.
“Ciao!” she said cheerfully with such a thick accent that Elio immediately knew that she wasn’t Italian.
“Can I help you?” he asked in English, testing his theory.
“Yeah, are you Elio Morelli?” she asked, switching to English without even seeming to think about it, which was weird in itself.
Elio opened the door a little wider and looked around. No one else was in the garden and he couldn’t see the dock from this area, so maybe it really was just some random woman and not a whole team of lawyers waiting to tackle him to the ground. Or maybe all of Marc’s paranoia about legal ramifications was starting to rub off on him. Weirdos still existed in the world, whether you were getting threatened with lawsuits or not.
“This isn’t the front door,” he said flatly, still set off-kilter by this whole situation.
“Yeah. I knocked there and no one answered,” she said with a shrug and a lazy smile.
“So you traipsed through my garden?”
“Ah-huh, and I found you!” She giggled and smiled, pleased with herself. Was she all there upstairs? Because Elio was starting to wonder if maybe she had escaped from a secure location…
“Look, I…” He trailed off as he noticed her eyes, one deep brown and the other bright green. He’d never seen eyes like it before. Was she wearing contacts or was he the one having some sort of psychological breakdown?
“Heterochromia,” she said, pointing to her eyes in a well-practiced gesture. “Genetics are wild, huh? Oh my God, sorry!”
She slapped a hand over her mouth. “I’m supposed to use Italian. Uh… Ciao. Mi chiamo…”
“English is fine,” Elio snapped. He didn’t have the patience today to listen to someone stumble their way through Italian. The woman didn’t take note of his tone though, and just smiled in relief.
“Oh, phew. My boss gets real mad when I use English, but then he also gets mad when I say I can’t work a shift because I’ve got Italian lessons that afternoon. Like come on, man, pick a side.”
“Can I help you with something or are you just trespassing for fun?”
“Oh, yeah.” She tapped the cardboard box. “I’ve got a delivery for Elio Morelli. Is that you?”
She held out the box. It was just plain cardboard with no address written on it anywhere, a single strip of brown masking tape securing it shut. Immediately, the hairs on the back of his neck rose, suspicion crawling through him like a swarm of spiders under his skin. Okay, so maybe Marc wasn’t being over dramatic after all.
“My personal mail doesn’t get delivered to the island,” he said, which it didn’t. There was a PO box on the mainland, and Gianna would bring the contents over whenever she had a shift.
The woman blinked at him, her mismatched eyes wide and innocent.
“Oh, I just got told to bring it here...”
“What is it?” he asked.
“I dunno,” she said with a shrug, those bizarre eyes of hers still wide and innocent. Oh my God, this woman was going to give him a coronary.
“Who’s it from?”
She peered at the box as if a label might magically appear. “The mainland?” she asked with clearly no idea. Elio just sighed sharply through his nose and raised an eyebrow, which seemed to send her into a panic spiral.
“Oh, please don’t make a complaint to my boss. If he finds out I lost the sticky note that was on it, he’ll for sure fire me, and it’s really not easy to get a job here when you’re Italian isn’t that good. I can read it great, and all the addresses are fine, but speaking it… Anyways, I remembered the address that it was supposed to be delivered to. I just don’t remember who it was from…”
“So leave it at the door and get off of my property,” Elio interrupted, feeling like he was just going in circles.
“There’s a storm coming,” she said, pointing to the rapidly darkening sky. “If I just leave it on your doorstep, it’ll blow off, and then I’ll get into trouble because apparently my boss thinks it”s my fault if the weather’s bad as well.”
She rolled her eyes at this employer of hers and shifted impatiently from foot to foot, as if he were the difficult one.
Elio’s phone started buzzing from inside the study, and on top of everything else, the sound of it felt like a jackhammer being drilled straight into his ear. He had to close his eyes for a second and take a breath because this whole fiasco was the last thing he needed right now.
“You work from home, huh?” the woman asked, peering around him and looking into the study like she owned the place. “That must be great, getting to be on your own all day. I work with this guy Nico, what a sleazebag. I’d wear my headphones at the warehouse and ignore him, but my boss doesn’t let us listen to music on the job…”
It was all too much after a week of feeling like a fugitive for no reason. The phone was still ringing with its cycle of shrill beeps. On top of that, the crash of waves around the island and claps of thunder above were getting louder every second, and the wind was picking up preparing for a storm. He could barely hear himself think. Unable to take the woman’s nonsensical ramblings on top of everything else, Elio snatched the box from her, just wanting everything to stop, for her to go away, to be left alone. She did indeed stop, her mouth frozen in a perfect “o” of surprise.
The tape was easy enough to get rid of, tearing off in one clean strip. Elio opened the box where he stood, not even bothering to go inside. He had been on the edge of exploding, pieces of him just disappearing into the ether out of frustration and overstimulation. Now he froze, staring at the stack of papers that were the only thing in the box.
“Mr. Morelli,” said the woman, the ditzy tone gone and replaced with a much sterner voice. “I am sorry, but these are a notification of legal proceedings from Mr. Noel Preston and his legal team. You’ll find all the necessary information for proceedings in the paperwork. I’ll leave you to it.”
With that, the woman turned to leave via the garden path as if this was all just fine, like she didn’t sneak in here and trick him into being served court papers like some sort of cartoon villain. And now she was just leaving?
As she was walking away, Elio finally found his voice.
“Hey!” he snapped, and she turned back with a raised eyebrow.
“You tricked me into taking these. That’s not fair!”
She offered him a sympathetic smile, which only made his blood boil more.
“Yes,” she said. “But you did take them, and I have visual confirmation that you have taken them and that you heard me explain what they are.”
“It shouldn’t count if it’s a trick.”
“It had to be a trick,” she said bluntly and waved a hand around at the island around them. “You didn’t exactly play fair to start with, sir.”
“Play fair? It should be invalid. You trespassed under false pretenses.”
“And you are welcome to have legal proceedings presented to me, and whoever serves the papers will do whatever they can to make sure they’re safely in my hands. That’s how it works.”
“And maybe I will do that,” Elio said, seething. “Let’s see how it makes you feel to be stalked down across the world.”
“Hey. It’s not my fault, okay,” she said, any sort of professionalism quickly evaporating as she got defensive. “I’m just doing my job.”
“Well, your job is done now. Leave.”
“Thank you so much for the permission. Are you sure you don’t need me to wait around so you can throw a vase at me? That’s usually what happens.”
“Anything within reach is worth too much to be throwing at the likes of you,” Elio sneered.
The woman just laid a hand on her chest as if gravely wounded. “Chivalry really is dead. I’ll see myself out, then.” She turned and began to make her way out of the garden.
“No!” Elio called, running to catch up, the papers still in his hand. “I’ll be going with you. I want to see you off this island with my own two eyes.”
“Maybe chivalry still has a lingering heartbeat in there somewhere,” she said with a smirk as if this was all very entertaining to her.
“Just get moving,” Elio said.
He walked close behind her, the papers clutched in his fist. He was now officially screwed, and he had the paperwork to prove it. At the very least, he was going to walk this girl to the dock and see her leave so he wouldn’t be looking around corners and into shadows wondering if she’d stuck around on a whim or to case out the property. Just because she was here for an actual reason didn’t mean that she couldn’t be crazy on top of it. He just wanted to be alone. Apparently, that was too much to ask these days, even when you bought yourself an island to get away from the world.
“Son of a…” The woman trailed off as they reached the front of the house and the dock came into view. It took Elio a second to realize what she’d been swearing at, then it hit him. There was no extra boat to be seen by the dock. Whoever had brought her here had left without her.
A thunderclap boomed above them, so loud that it made Elio’s ears ring. The woman looked up at the sky like it might come crashing down on her at any second, the difference in the color of her eyes somehow more stark in the dim lighting. The rain hadn’t started falling yet, but you could practically see the curtain of water blowing inland from the sea, bringing the crux of the storm with it.
“Your boat just left you?” Elio asked, to which the woman just shrugged, looking mildly disappointed as opposed to a normal reaction like anger or despair.
“Yeah, it was just some random fisherman guy. I’m surprised he brought me out in the first place, to be honest. Guess the storm spooked him off.”
She looked up at the roiling sky with the same annoyed set to her lips.
Just when he’d thought she couldn’t sound any more deranged…
“You can’t stay here,” Elio said, and as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew that it was precisely what she’d have to do. Because the “fisherman guy” had had the right idea leaving when he did. There was no way a boat was getting through these waters anytime soon. Elio was half tempted to use the private yacht moored to the dock, but the way it was swinging wildly around so close to shore, let alone out on open water… He was desperate, but he wasn’t about to put his life on the line just to kick her off his property.
When any sane human might be seeking shelter, the woman just stared out across to the mainland with her hands on her hips, like she was waiting in line at the grocery store or something.
“Now is not a great time to be admiring the view,” Elio said, continually baffled by her.
“I was wondering if I really could swim it, you know. It’s not that big a distance. You can even see the mainland.”
Elio just gaped at her, mostly because she sounded kind of serious as she said it.
“So I’ll take it that would be a bad idea?” she asked.
“Yes. Bad. I’m already being sued for this nonsense. I don’t need a dead body on my conscience as well.”
“Who, me?”
“Just get inside!” Elio shouted, having to be heard over the wind now.
She just stood there, still and stupid, as if she didn’t understand what he was saying. Maybe he was the crazy one.
“You want to drown out here?” he asked, thoroughly done with everything. “If not, then get inside, don’t touch anything, don’t rob me, don’t send information to whatever law firm these stupid papers are from and then leave to swim the ocean and die because apparently, you need that to be spelled out for you.”
The first splatters of water falling from the sky seemed to break her out of the spell of idiocy that must have been cast on her. She looked up at the black clouds with an appropriate amount of concern, then back to Elio as the realization of how screwed she was seemed to settle on her shoulders.
“Inside,” Elio said, turning for the house, refusing to get stuck in the rain that was starting to pick up steam. She could follow him or she could swim across to the mainland. Her choice. Elio looked over his shoulder and found her close on his heels, her mouth pressed into a thin, worried line. Great. Just what he needed, an unexpected, unwelcome house guest.