Chapter 15 Dear Guests
Three days I’d been getting the villa ready for the man who wrecked me, and three nights I hadn’t slept.
Then a glossy black sedan with a driver rolled onto the gravel in the long gold of the evening, and everything in me dropped as if the year had never happened: a screaming three-year-old on my arm, a bill in my fingers, and the paper shaking because the fingers were.
I stood behind the desk, held its edge, and gave myself one order. Don’t flinch. Whatever happens.
Hiding would’ve been easy: the office, a day in town, Marco taking the check-in. But this was my house and these were my guests, these two included, and in my house I met my guests myself. That was a rule.
Julie got out first. The same face, the same brazen good looks, only the dress was silk now, and expensive.
She took off her sunglasses and looked the villa over like something she’d already bought.
Then she settled her hand on Brandon’s arm with the same ownership she’d shown in the middle of my suite, and it all came back in one flash: his blue stripes on her shoulders, a small voice at my knee asking why Julie had Daddy’s shirt on. I held on to the wood.
Then Brandon. Tanned, rested, in no hurry, with that lazy, proprietary ease I once took for strength.
He wasn’t looking for me. Why would he. He looked at the oleanders in their tubs, the polished brass, the fresh white cloths on the terrace over the evening water, everything I’d pulled up out of neglect with my own hands and my own bad nights.
Satisfaction spread over his face, fed and smug.
“Not a bad pick, huh, Jules?” he called across the yard, at a volume meant for the staff. “Told you. Best villa on Como.”
My villa. My house, my ground, my people, and he stood in the middle of it praising his own taste, with no idea that every candlestick I’d polished was a small win over the woman he’d left here. I wanted to throw the nearest thing at him. I didn’t.
He came toward the desk without seeing me, with the look you give furniture, staff, empty space. One step. Another. On the third his stride caught.
He knew me.
Nothing moved. We looked at each other across the wood, me and the man who’d dropped me here a year ago like something he was done with.
On his face, astonishment, helpless and close to pitiful.
He’d been ready to find anybody behind the desk of the best hotel on Como, anybody but his wallflower, the convenient, cowed one.
I kept my mouth still and my face polite.
I looked him in the eye and didn’t look away.
I’d always looked away first, every time. Not today.
He got himself back faster than I’d expected and did the one thing he knew to do when the ground moved: he hit from above. His elbow came down on the desk. His eyes took stock of me.
“Katie,” he said. “Well. Small world.” He let it sit. “So you found yourself a spot. Housekeeping? Or did you work your way up to the front desk already? Look at that. Turned out good for something after all.”
A year ago those words would’ve taken me apart. I would’ve stammered, apologized, gone to cry in the linen room. Now they hit the same place, and nothing on my face moved. I picked up the key. My hand was steady. What it cost, nobody knew but me.
“Welcome to Camelia,” I said. “Your suite is on the second floor, with the lake view. Dinner is served from eight.” I set the key on his side of the wood. “Sir.”
It came out calm, almost warm, which was worse than any shout.
That the villa was mine now, that I was the one who ran this house, neither of them was going to learn. Not yet. Let him go up those stairs certain I handed out towels here. I’d spent too long building this house to trade my one trump card for a moment’s pleasure at watching his face fall.
“Sir,” he said, tasting it. He turned. “Jules, you hear that? They call me sir in this place.” Then he put the toe of his shoe to the suitcases and nudged them, one and then the other, toward the desk. “You’ll take those up, right? You’re the expert on that kind of thing.”
“The porter will take the bags.” I didn’t move, and I didn’t look away. “Enjoy your stay.”
He held the pause, waiting for me to break, to cry or snap back or run. What he got was a smooth wall with nothing on it to push. Julie, bored, tugged his arm toward the stairs with something about how long the trip had been, and they went up.
I stayed where I was, holding the edge of the desk, and let go of it one finger at a time until my hand was free. I’d barely been breathing.
He hadn’t asked about Maddie. Not one word.
A whole year he’d threatened to take her from me through the courts, a year of phone calls about lawyers and a federal crime that wore me down to nothing, and now he’d walked in and hadn’t asked where his daughter was, whether she was well, whether she was anywhere near.
That burned worse than every smirk he owned.
Maddie, thank God, was at Chiara’s sister’s for the week. I’d arranged it the day the booking came in. I held on to that as I’d held the desk. She didn’t have to see any of it.
At seven o’clock I was in the linen room, folding towels for the Bella Vista.
Nobody had asked me to. Any housekeeper in the building could fold a towel.
But somebody had to, and my hands had held the edge of a desk for an hour and needed a job with an end to it.
The linen room was the one place in the house that never changed with the season: the same shelves to the ceiling, and the same small window on the courtyard side where the light came in low at this hour and lay across the table in a bar.
The Bella Vista got the heavy white ones, the ones that cost twice what the staff wing’s did and came back from the laundry stiff with the press.
I laid each one flat on the table, folded the near third up, folded the far third over it, and ran the side of my hand down the seam.
Then once in half, so it sat square on the shelf.
Thirds, like the ones on my bed the June I was a guest in this house, on a tab I couldn’t pay.
The corridor outside the suite had smelled of her on my way past. Heavy and warm, with that bitter tobacco note under it, the one from my own dining room in Lincoln Park. I’d opened the corridor window without breaking step and kept walking. That was all I allowed myself.
“Well?”
Rosa was in the doorway. White linen, no pearls yet, one hand flat on the frame.
“I said sir.”
“I heard.” She turned the ring once, around and back. Her hands were the only part of her that ever gave anything away, and they gave away very little. “You want them out, they’re out tonight.”
“No.”
“No what?”
“He’s a guest.”
“He’s a guest,” Rosa agreed, the way you agree with the first half of a sentence and wait for the other half to show up.
I took the next towel off the stack. It was still warm.
“Seven nights,” I said. “He booked seven. I want him to have all seven. I want him to see the house. Every candlestick. Every cloth on every table. All of it, the way it is now.”
Rosa said nothing about a year, or what people on this lake did and didn’t forget. She looked at me over her glasses as she had the afternoon I asked for work, like a woman checking something against a list she’d already written.
“Then he’ll see it.”
That was as far as I’d gotten. There was no plan. There was the fold under my hand, and the fact that this time the move was mine, and no idea yet what the move was. I brought the far third over and pressed it down.
“Kate.” Chiara, behind Rosa’s shoulder, out of breath from the stairs, the leather wine list held against her chest. “The window table wants the wine list. He’s sat down early and he’s snapping his fingers for it.”
“Then he’s about to learn we don’t run to a snap.”
Rosa moved her shoulder an inch, and Chiara came in far enough for me to take the list out of her hands. I took it. Whoever came to that table with something in her hands came away smaller; I’d done four years of it. Chiara wasn’t going.
Her sandals went off down the corridor, past the open window, and she took the stairs two at a time, which I’d told her a hundred times not to.
“Dinner’s at eight,” Rosa said. “Wear the good dress.”
She went. Her steps didn’t hurry. They never did.
I put the wine list under my arm and finished the towel.
Near third up, far third over, the seam pressed down with the side of my hand, then once in half.
I set it on the Bella Vista pile as I’d once gone over a collar twice with the point of the iron so it would lie flat. Three folds, edges square.
I went into the restaurant after eight to keep an eye on dinner and found a second pair of eyes on me.
Alex, in the doorway, arms crossed, watching me cross the room for the third time to the window table where Brandon and Julie sat over their wine.
I trusted that table to nobody. I wanted to see my enemy with my own eyes and hear every word out of his mouth.
I came level with him and he spoke, low, with none of the old smile.
“You’ve circled that man all evening. Like you’re tied to him.”
“You don’t understand.”
“No. How could I.”
He looked at me as if, for the first time, he doubted all of it at once. “Maybe I really don’t, Kate. I held on a year for you. And he walks in, and you can’t take your eyes off him.”
I should’ve told him: I was watching an enemy, not mourning a husband. But at the window table Brandon raised his voice and snapped his fingers, and I apologized to Alex with my eyes, nothing more, and went to the snap.
Alessandro
He stayed in the doorway. He’d come back for her. He’d laid a year of patience at her feet. And the moment this polished man crooked a finger, she dropped everything and went.
It was the thing he’d always been afraid of. That he, the cheerful one, the light one, was loved as a game, until the first real man walked in.
He turned and went out into the dark yard, toward the red car on the gravel, and thought, seriously, that he’d come back for nothing.
Kate
I got to the table with the water jug and poured. Brandon was talking to Julie and didn’t lower his voice. He never did around staff.
“The partner comes up Thursday. Signor Conti.” He said the name like a wine he’d picked.
“The one I’ve been after. We do dinner here, this view, this place, so he sees he’s dealing with a man at a certain level.
He signs, and every guy who wrote me off gets to watch.
This trip pays for itself ten times over, Jules. ”
Julie sipped.
I topped up both glasses, calm and soundless, and inside me a plan was already putting itself together.
So that was why he’d come. Our anniversary, with another woman in my face, was the bonus.
He’d brought an important man here to dazzle him with luxury and polish, on my villa, with my people’s hands, knowing nothing about who ran this house now.
His whole game rested on one thing: who Signor Conti thought he was looking at when he sat down at that table.
And in this house, who a guest was looking at was mine to say.
I poured the last of the water. “Have a good evening.” I walked away as evenly as I’d come. Hitting back now, hot, in front of everyone, was his way. Not a scene. Politely, with no raised voice, the way things were done in this house.
Brandon had brought me both the weapon and the target, with his own hands. All that was left was to wait for Thursday.