Miranda caught sight of a small marble statue of an angel through a gap in the unkempt hedge towards the centre of the garden. The hedge had grown so tall it had created a secret hideaway like a maze hiding the Minotaur at the centre of it. The pathway leading to it was littered with leaves and weeds as if no one had been along here for a long time. There was a cobweb-covered wooden bench in the little alcove in front of the statue, providing a secluded spot for quiet reflection. But when she got close she realised it wasn’t a statue of an angel after all; it was of a small child of two or three years old.
Miranda bent down to look at the brass plaque that was all but covered by strangling weeds. She pushed them aside to read:
Rosamund Clemente Allegretti.
Lost but never forgotten.
There was a birth date of thirty years ago but the space where the date of passing should be was blank with just an open-ended dash.
Who was she? Who was this little girl who had been immortalised in white marble?
The sound of a footfall crunching on the leaves behind her made Miranda’s heart miss a beat. She scrambled to her feet to see the tall figure of Leandro coming towards her but then, when he saw what was behind her, he stopped dead. It was like he had been struck with something. Blind-sided. Stunned. His features were bleached of colour, going chalk-white beneath his tan. The column of his throat moved up and down: once. Twice. Three times. His eyes twitched, and then flickered, as if in pain.
‘You startled me, creeping up on me like that,’ Miranda said to fill the eerie silence. ‘I thought you were—’
‘A ghost?’
Something about his tone made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. But it was as if he were talking to himself, not her. He seemed hardly even aware she was there. His gaze was focussed on the statue, his brow heavily puckered—even more than usual.
Miranda leaned back against the cool pine-scented green of the hedge as he moved past her to stand in front of the statue. When he touched the little child’s head with one of his hands, she noticed it was visibly shaking.
‘Who is she?’ she said.
His hand fell away from the child’s head to hang by his side. ‘My sister.’
She gaped at him in surprise. ‘Your sister?’
He wasn’t looking at her but at the statue, his brows still drawn together in a deep crevasse. ‘Rosie. She disappeared when I was six years old. She was three.’
Disappeared? Miranda swallowed so convulsively she felt the walls of her throat close in on each other. He had a sister who had disappeared? The shock was like a slap. A punch. A wrecking ball banging against her heart. Why hadn’t he said something? For all these years he’d given the impression he was an only child. What a heart-breaking tragedy to keep hidden for all this time. Why hadn’t he told his closest friends? ‘You never said anything about having a sister. Not once. To anyone.’
‘I know,’ he said on an expelled breath. ‘It was easier than explaining.’
Why hadn’t she put two and two together before now? Of course that was why he was so standoffish. Grief did that. It kept you isolated in an invisible bubble of pain. No one could reach you and you couldn’t reach out. She knew the process all too well. ‘Because it was too...painful?’ she said.
He looked at her then, his dark eyes full of silent suffering. ‘It was my way of coping,’ he said. ‘Talking about her made it worse. It still does.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He gave her a sombre movement of his lips before he turned back to look at the statue. He stood there for a long moment, barely a muscle moving on his face apart from an in-and-out movement on his lean cheek, as if he were using every ounce of self-control to keep his emotions in check.
‘My father must’ve had this made,’ he said after a long moment. ‘I didn’t know it existed until now. I just glanced at the garden when I came yesterday—I couldn’t see this from the house.’
Miranda bit her lip as she watched him looking at the statue. He had his hands in his pockets and his shoulders were hunched forward slightly. Bone-deep sadness was etched in the landscape of his face.
She silently put a hand on his forearm and gave it a comforting squeeze. He turned his head to look down at her, his eyes meshing with hers as one of his hands came down on top, anchoring hers beneath his. She felt the imprint of his long, strong fingers, the warmth of his palm—the skin-on-skin touch that made something inside her belly shift sideways.
His gaze held hers steady.
Her breathing stalled. Her pulse quickened. Her heartbeat tripped and then raced.
Time froze.
The sounds of the garden—the twittering birds, the breeze ruffling the leaves, the drip of a leaky tap near one of the unkempt beds—faded into the background.