11
GAbrIELA DUARTE
Three days after the dance, I learned that Luca could behave perfectly well as though I’d never been in his arms.
He said nothing about Adrien, his jealousy, or what he’d admitted on the dance floor. He attended meetings, approved expenses, and challenged deadlines as coldly as ever. The only difference was how carefully he avoided being alone with me. I decided to return the favor.
After the road reopened, I’d arranged with Paola to stay at the Palazzo for the rest of my assessment. Collecting my remaining clothes and checking out of the guesthouse was easier than making the journey before seven every morning and after dinner every night. Luca had no part in the arrangement.
I managed to keep my distance until the Venetian supplier canceled the entire shipment of silk panels for the historic suites.
“What do you mean, canceled?” I asked, crossing the courtyard with the phone wedged between my ear and shoulder. “The order was confirmed six months ago.”
The representative spoke quickly in Italian. I slowed down.
“No, we paid the forty percent installment just over two weeks ago. I have the receipt… What do you mean, returned?”
Paola appeared in the project room doorway and gestured a question. I held up a finger.
“Signora Conti, don’t give our material to another client. I’ll be in Venice today. We’ll sort this out in person.”
I ended the call.
“The supplier’s bank returned that installment two weeks ago because of a discrepancy in the payment’s origin,” I told Paola. “No one answered the notices, so they sold half the production to a hotel in Dubai.”
“Who got the notices?”
“Procurement in Milan.”
She shut her eyes.
“Beatrice reorganized the department last month.”
I asked for the email trail. The notices had been redirected to an inbox set up during the reorganization. One had received an automatic reply in the project’s name, assuring the sender the problem would be resolved.
“Who was supposed to monitor that inbox?”
Paola lowered her voice.
“On the organizational chart, three people. In practice, apparently no one.”
“We need to find out who received them. This is going to cost us weeks.”
“I’ll ask for the access logs.”
I looked up at the windows of Luca’s and Lorenzo’s temporary offices.
“Keep the supplier’s original emails too.”
“To challenge the cancellation?”
“If we need to.”
She saved the files and requested an audit. The reply came under Lorenzo’s name: he would follow up with procurement.
“At least someone will have to answer for it,” she said.
I wrote the time of the first notice on the contract.
“Two weeks. Plenty of time to fix it.”
I still couldn’t understand why no one had contacted us sooner. Paola promised to let me know when she got the logs. I needed to keep them from selling the rest of our silk.
“Can we use a different fabric?” Luca asked behind us.
This time, I didn’t jump. I was starting to think the palazzo could conjure him whenever someone thought his name with enough irritation.
“Not without changing the entire color scheme of the suites. It was dyed to match the frescoes.”
“Call the owner.”
“I tried before I spoke to Paola. Conti sent word through the representative that he’ll only see me in person.”
“Arrange a car.”
“The train’s faster.”
“The helicopter’s faster than either.”
I looked at the overcast sky.
“In this visibility?”
“The pilot will decide.”
“Good. Let me know what he decides. I’ll meet you in Venice.”
I started to leave.
“We’re going together,” Luca said.
“There’s no need.”
“The contract is in the group’s name. Any renegotiation needs my approval.”
“I can call you.”
“Gabriela.”
His tone left me no way to refuse without making it personal. I turned.
“Just don’t invent any meetings to stop the supplier flirting with me.”
Paola coughed and walked away. Luca stood motionless for a second.
“Moreau wasn’t a supplier.”
“What a relief. So it was personal.”
“The helicopter leaves in forty minutes.”
He went inside before I could enjoy my victory.
The pilot cleared the flight. With a change in the weather forecast, Paola suggested we bring a change of clothes.
I fetched a small bag from my room, added a sleep shirt, and came back with the contracts.
A little over an hour later, I sat facing Luca in a leather-lined cabin, trying to study them as Lake Como vanished beneath the clouds.
I’d never been in a helicopter. I wasn’t about to admit it.
At the first bank, my fingers tightened on the folder. He noticed.
“Nauseous?”
“No.”
“Scared?”
“No to that too.”
Another shift sent my stomach upward. He took a water bottle from the side compartment and handed it to me.
“Look at the horizon, not down.”
“I said I’m not scared.”
“Of course.”
“Your condescension doesn’t get any less irritating at a thousand meters.”
“We’re at six hundred.”
I opened the bottle.
“So much better.”
A quick smile came and went. I looked out the window, taking his advice without admitting it.
“How does a payment get returned without anyone telling the project team?”
“It shouldn’t. I’ll look into it.”
“The messages went through Beatrice’s department.”
“That doesn’t mean she saw them.”
“Do you always defend her?”
He studied me.
“Are you jealous?”
I nearly choked on the water.
“It’s a professional question.”
“Another bad lie.”
My own words, handed back to me. The satisfaction in his gray eyes was subtle and unbearable.
“I’m not jealous of Beatrice.”
“Good.”
“But she talks as though there’s still something between you.”
“There was.”
I waited. He returned to the documents.
“Is that all?”
“What else do you want to know?”
“Nothing.”
“Then that’s all.”
I opened the contract and spent the rest of the flight pretending to read the same clause.
Venice appeared beneath us, an impossible drawing of red roofs, towers, and gray-green water. From the mainland airport, we went to the boat terminal. The last leg of the journey brought us to the textile workshop, hidden behind an unassuming facade in Cannaregio.
The owner, Vittorio Conti, was a thin man of seventy. He greeted me with suspicion and Luca with a calculated show of deference, then led us through rooms where silk threads shone on old looms.
“I can’t interrupt my new client’s production,” he said. “I lost weeks waiting for an answer.”
“We sent the payment. A banking error doesn’t void the contract.”
“The contract allows cancellation after ten days without resolution.”
“It also requires direct notice to the lead architect. We updated my contact details when I took over. Nothing was sent to me.”
He opened his mouth. I showed him the clause on my tablet.
“The emails went to finance, not the address specified here. The cancellation is invalid.”
He adjusted his glasses.
“Even so, I can’t produce both orders in the same time.”
Luca had said nothing. Now he moved toward a sample.
“How many looms are idle?”
“Two. I don’t have artisans to run them.”
“Bellandi Aurea will cover the extra shifts and temporary specialists. Your other client keeps their deadline. We get our order in four weeks.”
“The cost would be—”
“Work it out before you say no. We still have the other shipments to negotiate. We’d rather reach an agreement than go to court.”
Conti looked from Luca to me.
“I need to run the numbers.”
“Please do,” I said. “While you’re doing that, I’d like to see what hasn’t been sold.”
We spent three hours among looms, spreadsheets, and negotiations. I discovered Luca knew more about textile production than many designers, and could persuade without threatening when he chose. He let me lead the technical discussion, stepping in only when money became the deciding factor.
During a break, Conti took me to a handloom worked by a woman whose hands were bent with age. Gold thread crossed the green weave with a hypnotic slowness.
“A machine would make ten meters in the time we make one,” she said. “But a machine repeats. A hand responds.”
I noticed a slight irregularity in the pattern.
“That’s why it looks alive.”
Luca, standing behind me, caught the remark.
“You say that about anything that can’t be standardized.”
“Look at this curve. She corrected the pattern without stopping the loom. It’s a tiny difference, but you’ll see it when the light hits the fabric.”
“Investors fall in love with margins.”
“And yet you’re paying for extra shifts to save a handmade fabric.”
Conti laughed. Luca conceded with a tilt of his head. When Conti brought back the figures, Luca slid the page to me before answering. I marked two amounts. He challenged them without our needing to discuss it. I hid a smile behind my water glass.
The additional shifts would be offset by a discount on the remaining shipments from the same order. I checked the total twice. The deadline changed; the net cost didn’t. By nightfall, Luca and Conti had signed the amendment, and I’d confirmed the technical specifications.
“You did very well,” Luca said as we came out.
I stopped on the narrow sidewalk.
“Was that a compliment?”
“An observation.”
“Could you say it again? I want to record it.”
“Don’t ruin it.”
I smiled. For a few minutes, walking past old facades and lit bridges, it was easy to forget everything that made being with him dangerous. Until we reached the dock.
There we learned that fog had grounded the return flight. Luca checked his phone. We could catch the next train, make a connection in Milan, and get back to the palazzo in the early hours. The exhaustion of the negotiations finally caught up with me.
“I’d rather go back tomorrow,” he said. “Do you want to try the train?”
“I want to sit down to dinner. And sleep.”
He asked his assistant to check accommodations. There was a suite nearby, with a bedroom separate from the sitting room. For two rooms, we’d have to go to another hotel on the mainland.
At the desk of the hotel near the Grand Canal, the receptionist showed us the suite’s floor plan. A sliding door separated the bed from the sitting room and its sofa.
“How long to the other hotel?”
“About thirty-five minutes, with the transportation available now.”
Luca left it up to me. I looked at the plan again. I could close the door, take a shower, go to bed. No more traveling tonight.
“I’m fine with staying here. As long as I can close that door.”
“You can.”
The receptionist gave us the keys. In the elevator, I watched the floor numbers. Luca stood beside me, much too close in the mirrored space.
“We’ll set some rules,” he said.
“You do love rules.”
“I take the sofa. You take the bed.”
“Your first sensible rule.”
The doors opened. The suite was spacious and elegant.
A wood-and-glass sliding door separated the bedroom from the small sitting room.
I could shut it. I would still know Luca was sleeping a few steps away.
One glance told me the sofa would barely hold a man his height. He put down our bags and considered it.
“Don’t say a word.”
“I haven’t.”
“You’re smiling.”
“Your rules didn’t forbid that.”
He came closer, slowly.
“Yet.”
My smile vanished. For a moment, all of Venice seemed silent outside, and the suite’s only bed became the center of everything we’d been avoiding.