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Anton stood, needing more answers than he was going to get from his sister. But before leaving, he reached down, put a hand on her knee. ‘Is it Valencia?’ he prompted. ‘Are you so desperate to go back?’
She lifted her face to his, eyes hollow, so unlike the Amelia he’d grown up with. ‘No.’
A simple one-word answer that told him nothing.
‘Is it being here?’ Anton pushed. ‘Do you hate it?’
She shook her head. ‘I just need time, that’s all.’
He nodded, but a sense of uneasiness was spreading through him, and there was only one person he could think of to speak to, only one person he trusted with all his innermost thoughts, besides his new wife.
He reached for his phone as he strode from the courtyard, Ben’s number on speed dial.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BENEDETTO LISTENED TO his friend with an impassive mask. Despite the fact there was no one else in his office, he didn’t want to let his guard down. But his insides were far from unaffected by the phone call.
‘I’m worried about her.’
‘Why?’
‘She’s not happy.’
Benedetto gripped the phone more tightly. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘She’s my sister. I can tell.’
Benedetto’s eyes closed.
‘Did she tell you anything about her life in Valencia? About what she was doing there? Is it possible she had more going on than we realised? A serious relationship? Something important she couldn’t leave? But if that’s the case, why not go back? No one’s forcing her to be here. Did she say anything to you, Ben?’
‘No.’
‘I want to help her, I want her to be happy. I just don’t know where to start.’
Benedetto ground his teeth together. Guilt slammed into him. He’d messed everything up.
‘She’s been through a lot,’ Benedetto said.
‘I know. But this isn’t like Amelia. I’ve never seen her like this.’
Benedetto leaned back in his chair, his mind conjuring an image of Amelia with ease, her beautiful, happy face on the boat, her laugh, her sun-kissed smile.
‘So she didn’t say anything to you?’
Benedetto dragged a hand through his hair, not answering the question directly. ‘In my experience, no matter the problem, time’s the solution. Your sister is right. In time, she’ll be herself again.’
He disconnected the call as quickly as he could, hoping he was right.
But if having Amelia permanently moored in his brain had been hard before, it was almost impossible now that he imagined her miserable. Now that he saw her face as it had been after the wedding, when he’d found her staring at the fountain as though it held the answers to the universe. He imagined her sadness and ached to draw her into his arms, to hold her, to kiss her until she smiled against his mouth, until she laughed, or cried out in ecstatic euphoria, whichever came first. He ached to swim with her, to travel with her, to simply co-exist at her side. Five weeks after he last saw Amelia, and he began to suspect he was wrong: perhaps time wasn’t the answer he was looking for. So what was?
She wasn’t sure why she’d come back. Only when she’d woken that morning and gone through the motions of pretending everything was fine, that her heart wasn’t breaking over and over again, and her mother had asked what was on Amelia’s schedule, she’d heard herself say, without putting any thought into it, ‘I’m going to Crete.’
Only in uttering the words had she realised that she’d been thinking of that day with yearning for weeks now. In Crete, they’d walked hand in hand through narrow laneways, admired brightly coloured buildings, he’d picked a geranium flower and handed it to her—she still had it flattened in between the pages of a book. In Crete, she’d stopped running: from her family, but also from the love she felt for Benedetto. In Crete she’d accepted she couldn’t go in a different direction from him. And even though he’d subsequently left her, the need to be back on those streets, to exist in the midst of memories that were so tangible and real, had called to her.
‘Oh, lovely, darling. What will you do there?’
‘I have a few things in mind,’ she’d responded vaguely. ‘I’ll see you later today.’ She’d pressed a kiss to the top of her mother’s head, bowed in the vague direction of her father, then walked from the room with more purpose in her step than she’d had in over a month.
