A Twist of Fate (38 page)

Michael sighed wearily. ‘Don’t tell me you came all this way just to talk about Johnny?’

In part
, Thea thought,
yes, I really did
. Because after seeing both Johnny and Shelley Lawson, she
did
want to tell Michael what she’d discovered – that Johnny
and her mother had had a baby together, meaning that she now had a half-sister somewhere out there lost in the world. And she wanted to ask Michael if he’d ever known about Johnny and her
mother. She wanted to
share
all this with him, because he was the only one who’d known them both. He was the only one she
could
now share it with.

But equally she now understood – with a great heaviness in her heart – that this wasn’t the kind of information you could ever discuss with a stranger. And that’s what
Michael had become.

She felt the memory of what he’d once been to her drifting away like smoke.

‘I came here,’ she said, ‘because I wanted to tell you how sorry I was to hear about your mother . . .’

Michael looked down at his hands and Thea noticed them trembling. She had to force away the urge to lean forward and put her hands over his to still them.

‘I’d like to help,’ she told him. ‘I mean, I’d like to offer to get her the best care possible—’

‘We don’t need your charity.’ He practically spat out the words.

Indignation tore through her. ‘It’s not charity. Your mom practically brought me up,’ she snapped. It had happened so long ago and yet, talking about it now, it felt as raw as
it did back then. ‘Do you think I didn’t miss her when I was shipped off to boarding school? Do you really think I didn’t care?’

She felt tears rising up and fought them down furiously. Why did she have to get emotional now? Michael was the one who needed support, yet here she was being weak.

‘She wrote to you every week,’ Michael said. ‘You never replied.’

Thea stared at him, letting out a small gasp. ‘I never got her letters,’ she said, her mind racing over the fact that Storm must have thrown them away, or had simply not bothered to
send them on. ‘I had no idea where you were. Where either of you were. I was cut off, Michael. From everyone and everything I loved.’

She felt the colour blossoming in her cheeks, but he looked away. He rubbed at his brow, confused.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said then, swallowing hard. ‘I never knew. I never knew that at all.’

She did take his hand then. She clasped it between hers. She felt it trembling like a baby bird. She watched him close his eyes. His shoulders slumped.

‘I can give you the name of the care-home she’s in,’ he said. ‘It’s not far from Little Elms. I’ll be going there to see her as soon as they send me
home.’

‘And you’ll let me help?’

He didn’t answer. But why would he? she thought. He’d never ask for anything. That much about him, at least, hadn’t changed one jot. He still had too much pride. And so what if
he hadn’t actually given her permission? Thea thought. He hadn’t said no, either. And one thing she’d learnt as a businesswoman was this: not saying no was the same as saying
yes.

She squeezed his hand tighter. In her mind the deal was now sealed.

A blonde-haired female soldier in dark-green fatigues pushed through the door and smiled at Michael.

‘Hey, Mikey,’ she said.

‘Hey, yourself,’ Michael replied, a sudden warmth in his voice. He sat up straighter in his chair. ‘I hear you’re shipping out,’ he said.

Thea let go of Michael’s hand. The woman –
strike that
, Thea thought,
she can’t be much more than twenty-two
– had a Canadian accent. And was pretty with
it.

Thea smiled, stepping aside and walking over to the window as the girl came over to where Michael was sitting and started chatting about some mutual friend who’d just got hitched.

Thea watched them reflected in the glass. The girl liked Michael – that much was clear. She didn’t stop smiling, not once. And Thea, much to her surprise, found herself smiling as
well. Not at anything the two of them were saying. More because the girl kept glancing her way, clearly curious as to who she was, maybe even seeing her as some kind of competition. And for some
reason Thea couldn’t quite rationalize, that thought made her feel pretty good.

When the girl finally left a few minutes later, Thea went back to sit at Michael’s side.

‘She seemed nice,’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Attractive, too.’

‘I suppose . . .’

Thea glimpsed it then, just a flicker, just a trace of the old smile he’d always given her whenever they’d been sharing a joke.

‘So what
will
you do when you get home?’ she asked.

‘This and that. I have various leads. You don’t have to start worrying about me, after all this time.’

‘Well, that’s the thing . . . I never stopped worrying about you, Michael.’ She said it almost before thinking it.

Michael broke the awkward silence that followed.

‘Thea,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming. Would you let me have your number?’

She took one of her business cards out of her Gucci bag and handed it to him. He looked at it for a moment as if memorizing it, or not quite believing it was there. Then he sighed heavily, only
not out of anger or frustration this time, she thought, but out of fatigue.

She had so many questions. About all the years they’d spent apart. About his life in the military. His personal life. And what he planned to do next. But she knew they could wait. This
wasn’t going to be their last conversation. It was going to be their first.

‘I should get going,’ she said, standing up. ‘I’ve got a plane to catch.’

It was a white lie and he probably knew it. Her company jet would leave any time she chose. She leant down to kiss him goodbye. But this time he stood. He took her in his arms and hugged her
close. She held him too and, given a choice right then, she would have stayed like that until the moment she died.

When they stepped back from one another she was smiling.

May 2005

Romy took a slug of wine as she slumped on the worn leather couch, surfing the channels on TV for anything mindless to watch, the remains of a tasteless microwave meal on the
chipped metal tray in front of her. But
The Simpsons
had finished and the news was depressing, with earthquakes around the world and riots in Paris. The only story that had interested her
was the introduction of a new act in the UK to make civil partnerships legal for same-sex couples, but it had only made her think of Nico and the boyfriend he’d had before he’d died.
With a sad sigh, she switched off the TV.

She’d only been in this new apartment for two weeks. Removal boxes were still stacked up against the wall and she supposed she should start unpacking them. But she was too tired. Like
every day these days, it just felt like she never stopped.

Through the open window of her top-floor apartment she could hear two people calling out to one another on the road below, their bikes hissing along the tarmac. Listening to the sound of their
laughter drift off, she got up to draw the long wooden shutters over the windows, realizing as she looked outside that it was nearly ten o’clock already and the light had only just gone. The
trees lining the Amsterdam canal below were all in blossom, but it seemed only yesterday that the city had been covered in snow.

It was a horrible fact of life, Romy thought, as she shut the night out, that time moved so fast, nothing lasted. Not even grief lasted forever. After it had eaten the essence of you, devoured a
piece of your soul, it moved on somewhere else. Then life – at least a pale imitation of life – carried on, whether you wanted it to or not.

She knew she ought to be grateful. Across the world people had been scarred by the events of 11 September 2001, but the date would be forever etched on Romy’s mind as the date that her
life had been robbed too.

She remembered nothing of the crash itself, even now, nearly four years later. She only remembered the terrifying, fragmented moments leading up to it. The insane look on Claudia’s face as
she’d levelled that pistol at Nico and fired. The echo of Romy’s own footsteps in the corridor as she and Alfonso had fled for their lives. The roar of the Mercedes’s engine. The
BMW’s headlights rushing up behind. The shriek of sirens.

She’d been told afterwards, when she’d surfaced from her week-long concussion, that Alfonso’s Mercedes had crashed through the villa gates into the path of two fire engines,
which had been hurtling towards an entirely separate incident.

The first had ploughed at sixty miles an hour into the driver’s side of the car, crumpling it like a Coke can, killing Alfonso instantly and sending the car into an airborne spin. Romy,
whose seatbelt had sprung open as the car had slammed into Villa Gasperi’s garden wall, had been catapulted into a thicket of roadside shrubs, which had mercifully broken her fall, saving her
life, but had left her with two broken legs and five broken ribs all the same.

The second fire engine had caught the BMW chasing after them, killing Ulrich, Claudia and their accomplice outright. After the fireball that had resulted, there had been so little left of the
bodies that no identifications had ever been made.

Romy’s recovery had been painfully slow. All she’d been able to think about, as she’d stared at the ceiling of the darkened hospital room hour after hour, had been that her
husband – the only man she’d ever loved – was dead. And he’d died because of her. Because of her past. Which meant that it had been her fault.

And dear Nico . . . her talented, wonderful best friend, who had tried so hard to protect her, the same way he always had. Brutally, cold-bloodedly murdered.

Her fault too.

At least in hospital Romy had been protected from the intense media scrutiny of the Scolari family. Even so, like a pack of baying dogs, the world’s press had been camped outside,
clamouring for information, waiting to get a picture of Romy’s grieving face. The tragic end of her fairytale story was too much to resist.

But even just out of reach of the press, there had still been the questions from the police. Endless questions. Ones they’d felt only she could answer. Who were these killers? Why had they
come here? How had they got past the guard? How had they stolen so much of the precious art that had been lost in the car crash?

Romy had told them nothing. None of what she’d admitted to Alfonso and Nico. If she’d admitted that she’d known Claudia and Ulrich, the police would soon have worked out the
rest. About what she’d done to Fox. And the orphanage fire.

None of that would have brought Alfonso or Nico back. That’s what Romy had told herself in the numbness of those first interrogations. And with Claudia and Ulrich already being nothing but
charred bones and ash lost on the wind, what difference could knowing their names possibly have made to the police?

Instead, Romy had done what she’d always done. She’d buried her past down just as deep as she could.

She’d told herself that it was fairer, also, on Roberto and Maria to let them think that Ulrich and his gang had simply been nameless criminals, there to steal Roberto’s paintings,
nothing more. And as her lies had come thick and fast, she’d imagined that they were papering over the gaping hole of the truth of who she really was. Which was surely so much better than
admitting to Alfonso’s family that, right from the start, everything she’d ever told them about herself had been a lie.

But what she hadn’t been able to deal with was Maria and Roberto’s grief. Watching it, being close to it, feeling it mix in with her own misery and multiply. Rather than their
proximity being a comfort, it had left her wishing herself dead.

They’d waited patiently – Maria and Roberto, the sisters – one of them coming each day to the hospital to visit her, encouraging her through her therapy sessions, ready to take
her back with them the moment she was discharged. Flavia even bought her designer shoes, but Romy couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for them. How could she think about shoes – how could
she even bear to walk again – when Alfonso was dead?

For all their good intentions, Romy had felt suffocated by the Scolaris – the family she’d wanted as her own. For all their loyalty to her, she was a traitor to them. It had soon
reached the point where she’d barely been able to look them in the eyes.

And there’d been another reason she’d kept silent too. Another reason that she didn’t dare admit even to herself, until nearly three months after Alfonso’s death.

But it had been reason enough to make up her mind. Reason enough to leave a note for Alfonso’s family, check herself out of the hospital and sneak away. Reason enough to start again,
somewhere new, on her own.

‘Mamma?’

Romy quickly turned away from the window and went through the door behind the sofa.

Alfie was sitting up in bed, bathed in the soft glow of the night-light. He had long black eyelashes, just like his father, and Romy felt her heart contracting with love as she went to her
son.

‘Hey? What’s the matter?’ she asked, sitting beside him on his duvet and stroking his forehead.

‘I can’t sleep.’

Now she kicked off her slippers and tucked herself under the duvet with Alfie, cuddling him tight in his little bed.

‘Is Papa with angels?’ he asked her. She was amazed at his ability not only to express himself, but to ask such searching questions. Since he’d started talking at just eighteen
months, he hadn’t stopped. Now, at three, Romy was constantly surprised by his grasp on the world.

‘Yes, he is.’

‘Do the angels have cars?’

‘Of course. Papa’s got the fastest car in heaven. Didn’t you see his tyre tracks across the sky earlier?’

It was an old joke between them that the vapour trails left by the planes taking off from Schiphol Airport, which often drifted this way over the town, were really left by Alfonso, who was
constantly driving over the city to check that they were OK.

Romy had bought a new computer and spent her evenings trawling through old press cuttings and buying posters online. The one at the end of Alfie’s bed that they’d put up earlier was
Romy’s best find yet: a black-and-white poster of Alfonso spraying a magnum of champagne when he’d won the Japanese Grand Prix. They both stared at it now.