easy to when you know...’ Sophie shrugged. ‘Well, let’s just say I’m not too worried about how the cake is going to look and whether Teresa has had enough notice.’ She looked right into his eyes. ‘How could you even consider doing this to him, Luka?’
‘How could you have done this to us?’
His words didn’t confuse her, they ate at her instead.
She remembered standing on the beach, confused and ashamed and shouting, when their mouths should have been kissing.
She remembered hurling the sins of his father at him when she should have loved him first.
The plane came in to land and they sat in silence, but as they hit the tarmac, as they hurtled down the runway, Sophie didn’t care if the plane lifted now and took them away.
But it came to a halt and they were home.
‘I’m not perfect...’ Sophie turned to him ‘...but I’d fight for us.’
‘Nice speech,’ Luka said. ‘Tell me, though, Sophie—when did you ever fight for us? Did you come to my father’s funeral? You would have known I had no one, the hell it would be to come home...’
‘I was going to,’ Sophie said, ‘but I had just found out that my father was terminally ill.’
‘He still is,’ Luka replied, unmoved. ‘You’ve held up the death card and I’m here. That’s not an excuse not to show up on the day you would have known I needed you the most.’
He accepted no excuses for her carelessness with their love.
Did she sit there now and tell him the truth?
That he was right?
It hadn’t been her father’s illness that had stopped her contacting him.
Did she tell him she couldn’t have afforded it?
Would a man like Luka accept as an excuse that she’d had no money? That he’d have had to wire her the fare?
‘Did you fight for us on the beach, when I pleaded with you to come with me?’ Luka asked.
‘No.’
Her single word moved him. She did not kick up with her usual defence as to how he had shamed her in court.
‘So when did you fight for us, Sophie?’
‘I’ll fight now.’
Luka said nothing.
He just stood as the passengers disembarked.
‘I’ll see you to your home,’ Luka said.
It was a strange ride.
Her father never stopped coughing. There was the angel of death in the car with them and turned backs on the streets as Sophie looked out.
Yet it was home.
And it was somehow beautiful.
‘Do you remember...?’ She stopped.
Eight years old to his fourteen, she had found Luka crying for the first and last time, washing blood from his face in the river.
‘Did you fall?’ she had asked.
‘Yes, I fell.’
They had sat eating nectarines and she had looked at his bruised, bloodied nose and closed eye.
‘One day,’ Sophie had said, ‘you will be taller than him.’
‘Who?’ Luka had asked, because then he had still been loyal to his father.
‘Taller than any man in this town,’ she had said.
‘I remember,’ Luka said, and she did not turn or jump to the sound of his voice.
Here it felt normal.
Here they were as entwined as the vines and the roots beneath them.
They passed the school where she had left at fifteen to work in the hotel.
‘I cried the day I left,’ Sophie admitted. ‘I wanted to learn all the poems. I wanted to sort out the maths...’
‘You have the cleverest head on the planet,’ Luka said.
‘Yet I can’t work us out.’
‘We’re here,’ Bella said, and Sophie looked as they turned from the hotel and into her street.
It was the same, except different.
The neighbour’s house had changed and was tastefully renovated. ‘It smells of London.’ Sophie winked as she waved to her weekender neighbours.
‘I’ll leave you here,’ Luka said, having helped Paulo up the path.
‘You’re not going to come in for coffee?’
‘I’m going to go and check into the hotel,’ Luka said, once he had ensured everything was okay. ‘And then I am meeting with Matteo.’
He didn’t want to go in.
He didn’t want to see just how poor his father had kept them.
‘I might go for a walk,’ Bella said. ‘I would like to look at my old home, even if there are other people living there...’
Sophie looked at Luka but he gave her a slight shake of his head and pulled her aside. ‘I haven’t told everyone what I am doing. I don’t want anyone feeling beholden. My lawyer will contact people once I’ve gone. Bella will find out soon enough that she has a home.’
Thank God for the nurse, because she took an exhausted, overwrought Paulo to his room for some oxygen and medication.
‘It is your last day as a single woman,’ Paulo wheezed. ‘You should go out with Bella.’
‘I’m just happy to be home.’
Sophie was. Though it felt so strange to be back.
Happy her father was settled, she set to work. There was a lot to be done and also there was Teresa to pay.
She walked into town, trying not to look up. She didn’t want to see Malvolio’s home spreading out over the top of the hill.
She didn’t want to glimpse the bedroom where she and Luka had first made love and she averted her eyes as she passed the church where tomorrow he would leave her standing.
Sophie walked into Teresa’s deli and, just as they had the last time she’d done so, the people in the deli fell silent. Angela was there, chatting with Teresa and a couple of other locals, and Sophie felt her cheeks turn to fire as she stepped up to the counter.
‘I’ve
