CHAPTER ELEVEN
HERFLATSMELTmusty after so many months left empty. Mechanically, Lana went around opening windows to let in fresh air, despite the damp chill outside, flicking on the heating, filling the kettle. She was going through the motions, but inside she was collapsing. Less than twenty-four hours ago she had been at the palazzo. Staring at that plastic strip with a hollowing of her insides.
I thought it would reassure me—not devastate me!
She had felt panic wash over her, but had fought it back. Fought to retain control of herself. Fought to think...
And she had done that all evening—thinking and thinking and thinking, until her head ached with it. Every thought piercing her like the thrust of a knife.
She was pregnant. Something that she had never envisaged as even a possibility. And something she never, never would have wanted—for one stark, implacable reason.
Because it was not part of the deal. The deal she had struck with Salvatore. The very simple, very unambiguous deal.
I play the role of his wife—he pays off my mortgage in our pre-planned divorce settlement.
And the fact that playing the role of his wife had turned into her having a searing affair with him changed nothing! Nothing at all.
She’d paced her bedroom at the palazzo, back and forth, trying to see it in another way. But it had been impossible.
He never signed up for this—me getting pregnant. He never signed up to anything more than a year with me.
She’d gazed bleakly out of the darkened window, seeing nothing of the night beyond, expression drawn. A year was all he wanted—he’d been up-front, honest, straight-up. That honesty of his—after Malcolm’s lies and deceit—was what she had valued so much in her relationship with Salvatore. She had trusted him—and he had trusted her. They had both known they would abide by their agreement with each other. And so for her to tell him now that she was carrying his child...
Her face contorted in misery.
He’ll think I did it deliberately—or carelessly. It doesn’t matter which because the effect will be the same. He’ll feel it’s his obligation to stand by me—to make our marriage last in a way he never intended it to! It will chain him to me—chain him to a child he never planned for. Chain him in this marriage when I know how negatively he feels about marriage.
How could she do that to him?
She couldn’t—that was all. She just could not.
And so in the morning, after a sleepless night, her head still aching, she had made the only possible decision. She’d packed a suitcase as if she were intending Milan to be her destination, and to account for why she wanted to get to Pisa airport that morning had told the staff she was flying up a day early, to surprise Salvatore. Then she had taken the first flight to London.
It had been agony to do so.
Agony to leave Italy.
To force herself to do so.
To leave Salvatore.
To know I will never see him again—
She felt that agony again, now, as she stood in the kitchen of her flat, musty and empty and drear, a thousand miles away from where she longed to be, hearing the kettle come to the boil. Sightlessly staring at the mug she’d taken out of the cupboard, at the packet of fruit tea she’d opened, filled with misery and anguish, her face drawn and gaunt, she faced the truth about why it was such agony to have done what she had. Leave Salvatore. Faced the truth she had been trying to deny for so long now, all through those glorious sun-filled days with Salvatore, in the ecstasy of their passionate nights together.
I’ve fallen in love with him! With Salvatore.
Too late—oh, far too late—self-knowledge pierced her. Was that what she had feared all along? That she would not be able to stop herself falling in love with him?
Is that why I turned him down that first time we ever met? Why I wanted our marriage to be in name only? Why I told him, that night when we’d come back from Florence, that I could not let it be anything else, saying it was because he was going to pay off my mortgage that I could not let there be anything between us?
And when she’d been able to resist him no longer, when it had become impossible to say no to him, then...oh, then she had known. She had kept reminding herself that they must part at the pre-appointed time, that she must hope for nothing more, must give nothing of herself, want nothing more from him than what they had.
In vain.
I went and fell in love with him... Knowing that it could come to nothing...
Heaviness crushed her. And hopelessness.