He admitted to his lie in the restaurant. ‘Not the people, more...’ He hesitated.
‘I miss it too,’ she said. ‘Every day I tell myself that I love Rome and I do. I love the freedom, I love that I am no longer scared, yet I miss so many things about Bordo Del Cielo. I miss the beach,’ she admitted. ‘Sophie and I would go there every day. I miss the markets too and the food. I miss days spent exploring. If I lived there for ever there would still be more to discover...’
‘How was your mother about you leaving?’ Matteo asked.
Bella lay there.
Because she had so few people in her life, the question barely came up. She had only had to say perhaps a handful of times that her mother was dead, and she just didn’t know how to say it now and not break down.
She asked him a question instead.
‘What do you miss?’
‘I don’t know exactly. Just those last six months...’ Matteo answered. He took no offence that she hadn’t answered; he was the master at being evasive when people asked things about his past.
He thought for a moment and she watched, a little smile on his dark red lips as he thought of them. ‘I’ve never even told Luka, given he spent those months in prison, but during that time, running the hotel not having someone breathing down my neck, I felt I might get somewhere, I could see myself living there without wanting to get away...’
‘Do you really not miss your mother?’ Bella asked. She just couldn’t imagine he wrote his family off that easily.
‘There’s nothing to miss. She was barely there when I was growing up. She hated me,’ Matteo said, and Bella frowned.
‘I doubt she actually hated you...’
‘Oh, she told me so,’ he said. ‘And he didn’t have to tell me that, his fists did the talking. I never remember a time she wasn’t married to him...’ Even to this day Matteo would not call his stepfather by name.
‘Do you think she might have been scared to show him she loved you?’
‘Perhaps at first but then she became as cruel as him. I remember when I was about five and I sat there at the dinner table and, as always, she served him first. Then she served Dino, he would have been about three, then she served herself. I remember watching her. I was hungry, but then he said he wanted more sauce on his pasta and so she gave him more. Then Dino. Always. I knew the routine and only after they had had seconds would she serve me. But that time she didn’t. She served more for herself and I got not only the scraps, I got the message—I came nowhere.’
Bella could remember her own mother and how she would tell her she had already eaten, how she’d done everything she could to make sure that Bella didn’t go hungry.
To think that a mother would do that deliberately.
‘I would go to Luka’s. I didn’t like it much there either but there was always food. I was home less and less but then Luka went to boarding school so I had no choice but to go back. We had a row when I was fifteen and I haven’t spent a night there since.’
‘Was that when she told you she hated you?’
‘Yep,’ Matteo said. ‘Or rather, I asked her why she hated me and she said that I reminded her of my father. I didn’t really know much about him so I said, “What, did he treat you badly?” She said no, he had treated her well and that was why she could not stand to look at me. I was too painful a reminder of good times.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Malvolio said I could stay in one of the fisherman’s cottages on the beach. I told him I couldn’t pay rent and he said that was no problem. He would find some jobs for me.’ Behind his glasses Matteo rolled his eyes. ‘And of course he did. I used to resent Luka. He went and studied in London and I wanted to ask if I could go and join him but I was too proud. I made out that I loved the place... When he came back to end things with Sophie, I knew he was cutting all ties. We were going to meet up for a drink at the airport. I was going to ask him then to help me get out but, like you, he never showed. He had an excuse, though, given he’d been arrested...’
She didn’t take the opening.
‘What’s your excuse, Bella? Were you never intending to show, or did Maria talk you out of it?’
Still she did not answer him.
‘Tell me another truth, then,’ Matteo said, and he did not turn his head to hers. ‘This morning wasn’t an accident.’
‘No.’
‘Did you plan to throw the water?’
‘Do you really want the truth?’ Bella checked, and now their faces turned and Matteo removed his glasses and their eyes met. ‘I hoped you might be alone.’
‘To talk?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Bella said. ‘I find talking to you the hardest part...’ She thought back to last night and the little note she had written him. There had been this tiny kernel, a tiny dream that with Sophie and Luka together, even temporarily, Matteo might have been hoping to see her too.
‘So what would have happened if I had been alone?’ Matteo asked.
If you could be unfaithful with just your eyes, he was then.
And if you could be the other woman with just a look, then that was who she was.
They did not touch, their eyes did not assess each other’s bodies but, Bella knew, if he was hers and he shared this look with another woman, she would die.
He looked down at her mouth and there was such tension in her lips as they fought from meeting his and then he moved back to her gaze.
They made love.
Past love, perhaps, but together they watched the memory. He bathed her, washed her, tasted her, made love to her and they both lay, five years later, locked in recall.
It was such a dangerous game they played with their eyes.
‘We were so good,’ she murmured.
‘We were.’
And if they moved, even a fraction, they could not justify to anyone that they were mere friends.
‘But you have a nice life now...’ Bella tried to break the spell. ‘I see you in some of the magazines.’
‘They make a lot of stuff up.’
‘And they tell some truths,’ she said. ‘They found out about your scar. You never told me you were stabbed.’
‘I said to you that I was in a fight.’
‘And it was interesting to read that Shandy got suspended from school when she was sixteen for drinking.’
Matteo swallowed. His throat was suddenly dry; he knew what was coming.
‘They pay a lot of attention to your past,
