by Fiona Harper
They got her to her feet again and she met their eyes. There was no point in trying to hide anything now.
‘My daughter—Kate—contacted me a couple of months ago. We’ve met a few times—’
‘Kate?’ The strangled noise that left Scarlett’s mouth was hardly even a word. Jackie watched in astonishment as her normally feisty, bull-headed little sister broke down and sobbed. ‘You had a little girl, a little girl,’ she whimpered, over and over.
Jackie was stunned. Not just by Scarlett’s reaction, but by the outpouring of emotion; it must mean that, on some level, Scarlett didn’t despise her as much as she’d thought. She’d always seemed so indifferent.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Scarlett finally mumbled through her tears. Jackie turned to Isabella, hoping for an explanation, but Isabella wasn’t in a much better state herself.
A thought struck her. ‘You can’t tell anyone about Kate!’ she said quickly. ‘Not yet.’
My goodness, if this was going to be the reaction to the news, she’d been right to decide to keep her mouth shut until after the wedding.
‘It’s okay,’ she added, taking a deep breath. ‘Things are going to be okay. Kate and I are getting to know each other. Things are going to work out, you’ll see. So don’t be sad for me—be happy.’
She’d hoped she sounded convincing, but she’d obviously missed the mark, because Scarlett and Isabella, who had been in the process of mopping up a little with a few tissues that Isabella had pulled from her pocket, just started crying even harder. Jackie stood there, dumbfounded, as they sat down on the two tree stumps looking very sorry for themselves indeed.
And then another thought struck her. One that should have popped into her head at the beginning of this surreal ‘lunch’, but she’d been too shocked to even think about it.
‘How?’
Both the other women went suddenly very still.
‘How did you find out? Did Mamma tell you?’
They both shook their heads, perfectly in time with each other. If she weren’t in the middle of a crisis, Jackie would have found it funny.
‘Then how?’
Scarlett looked up at her, her eyes full of shame. She didn’t even manage to maintain eye contact for more than a few seconds and dropped her gaze to the floor before she spoke.
‘The letter.’
What letter? What was Scarlett talking about? Had Mamma written a—
White light exploded behind Jackie’s eyelids. She marched over to Scarlett’s tree stump and stood there, hands on hips, just as she would have done when she’d been a stroppy fifteen-year-old, and made her sister look at her.
‘You read the letter? My letter?’
Scarlett bit her lip and nodded.
‘How dare you! How dare you! How—’
She was so consumed with rage she couldn’t come up with any new words. Not even wanting to share a woodland clearing with the other two women, she strode over to the stream, as far away from them as she could possibly get without getting tangled up in trees, and stared into the cool green tranquillity of the woods.
Another thought bubbled its way to the surface. She turned round and found them twisting round on their tree stumps, watching her.
‘Then you know who…’
Isabella swallowed. ‘Romano.’
Jackie covered her mouth with her hand. This was worse than she’d imagined. Hen nights involving L-plates, obscene confectionery and tiaras would have been a walk in the park compared to this.
She exhaled. It all made sense now—why they’d freaked out when they’d seen her and Romano together back at the restaurant. But why had they dragged her away? Why tell her now?
‘We didn’t ever tell anyone else,’ Isabella added hastily.
Jackie breathed out and sat down on the crate—the good one—and looked at her sister and her cousin.
They knew. And that had been her secret mission this visit, hadn’t it? To tell everyone. Did it really matter if Scarlett and Isabella had known all along? Probably not. It would just be one difficult conversation she could cross off her list. They’d actually done her a favour.
Her anger had faded now, and she even managed a tiny smile. ‘I was planning on telling you all after the wedding, anyway. Kate would really like to meet her aunts and uncles and I think it’s time this secret came out into the open.’
Why weren’t Scarlett and Isabella looking more relieved? They were still folded into awkward positions on their tree stumps. She decided to lighten the atmosphere.
‘The least you two can do after all this is help me break the news to Mamma. I think you owe me!’ And to let them know she was rising above it, dealing with the past and moving on, she gave them a magnanimous smile.
‘You don’t understand,’ Scarlett said, rising from her stump, her forehead furrowing into even deeper lines. ‘There’s more.’
More? How could there be more? She’d told them everything. There were no more secrets left to uncover.
CHAPTER FOUR
SCARLETT gulped and cleared her throat. ‘The letter… I brought it here to show Isabella.’
Jackie felt her core temperature rise a few notches.
‘You have to remember—’ Scarlett shot a glance at Isabella ‘—we were only eleven…’
Jackie’s voice was low and even when she spoke. This was the tone that made her staff run for cover. ‘What else, Scarlett? You did give my letter to Romano yourself, not pass it to someone else to give to him? If someone else knows—’
Isabella, who’d been unable to stand still for the last few moments, jumped in. ‘It was my fault. I wanted to tell Aunt Lisa at first…’ She trailed off at the look on Jackie’s face. ‘I didn’t!’ she added quickly.
‘We fought,’ Scarlett said, her voice gaining volume but at the same time becoming toneless, emotionless. ‘Isabella had hold of the letter and I tried to snatch it away from her. It just seemed to leap out of my hands…’
They ripped the letter a little? Got it dirty? What? Jackie willed Scarlett to say either of those things. Just a little smudge. No harm done. But she could tell from the look of pure desolation on Scarlett’s face that the fate of her letter had been much worse.
‘What happened to it?’ she asked, and her voice wobbled in unison with her stomach.
Scarlett didn’t say anything but her gaze shot guiltily towards the stream innocently bubbling over the stones, and lingered there.
‘No!’ It was barely a whisper, barely even a sound. Suddenly Jackie needed to hold something, to cling onto something, but nothing solid was within easy reach. Everything was moving in the breeze, shifting under her feet.
Tears started to flow down Scarlett’s cheeks again. ‘I’m so sorry, Jackie. I’m so sorry…’
Jackie tried to breathe properly. Her letter to Romano had ended up in the stream? Thinking became an effort, her brain cells as slow and thick as wallpaper paste. She knew it was awful, her worst nightmare, but she couldn’t for the life of her seem to connect all the dots and work out why.
‘I didn’t realise at the time what I’d done,’ Scarlett said, dragging the tears off her cheeks with the heels of her hands. ‘I didn’t realise what it meant, that Romano was even the father… It was only later, when you and Mamma were shouting all the time.’ She hiccupped. ‘And then she sent you away. I knew I’d done something bad, but it wasn’t until I was older, that I put all the pieces together, and understood what it all meant for you and Romano.’
Romano.
The letter had been for Romano.
Work, brain. Work!
She looked at the stream.
And then the forest upended itself. She didn’t faint or throw up, although she felt it likely she might do either or both, but the strength of the revelation actually knocked her off her feet and she found herself sitting on the hard compacted earth, her bottom cooling as its dampness seeped into the seat of her trousers.
She closed her eyes and fought the feeling she w
as toppling into a black hole.
Oh, no… Oh, no… Oh, no.
The truth was an icy blade, slicing into her. Adrenaline surged through her system, making clarity impossible. She had to do something. She had to go somewhere.
Jackie staggered to her feet and started to run.
Romano didn’t know.
Romano had never known.
There was a knock at the bedroom door. Jackie hadn’t been moving, just lying spreadeagled on the bed staring at the ceiling, but she held her breath and waited. When she heard footsteps getting quieter on the landing she let the air out again slowly, in one long sigh.
From her position flat on the bed she could hear voices murmuring, the occasional distant chink of an ice cube. Mamma must have opened the drawing-room doors that led onto the terrace. She glanced at the clock. Ah, cocktail hour. Vesuvius could erupt again and Mamma would still have cocktails at seven.
But there were no Manhattans or Cosmopolitans for Jackie this evening, just an uneasy mix of truth, regret and nausea, with an added slice of bitterness stuck gaily on the edge of the glass.
A migraine had been the best excuse she’d been able to come up when she’d arrived back at the house, uncharacteristically pink, sweaty and breathless. And to be honest, it wasn’t far from the truth. Her head did hurt.
Mamma had moaned in her sideways way about self-indulgence, but she hadn’t pushed the issue, thank goodness. She was far too busy to deal with her middle daughter. Nothing new there, then.
No way was Jackie going downstairs tonight. Mamma and Scarlett would be more than she could handle in her present state of mind. No, she wouldn’t leave this room until she had pulled herself together and done the laces up tight.
Now the threat of interruption had diminished she hauled herself off the bed and looked around her old bedroom. If she squinted hard she could imagine the posters that had once lined the walls, the piles of books on the floor, the certificates in frames.
Of course, none of it remained. Mamma wasn’t the kind to keep shrines to her darling daughters once they’d flown the nest. She’d redecorated this room the spring after Jackie had moved to London for good. In its present incarnation, it was an elegant guest room in shades of dusky lavender and dove grey.
Jackie caught herself and gave a wry smile.
Here she was, undergoing the most traumatic event since giving birth, and all she could think about was the decor. What was wrong with her?
Nothing. Nothing was wrong with her.
It was just easier to notice the wallpaper than it was to delve into this afternoon’s revelations.
Uh-oh. Here came the stomach lurching again. And the feeling she was stuck inside her own skin, desperate to claw her way out. She steadied herself on the dressing table as her forehead throbbed, avoiding her own gaze in the mirror.
Everything she’d believed to be true for the last seventeen years, the foundation on which she’d forged a life, had been a lie.
She stood up and walked across the room just because she needed to move. She couldn’t get her head round this. Who was she if she wasn’t Jacqueline Patterson, a woman fuelled by past betrayal and life’s hard knocks? Possibly not the sort of woman who could have climbed over a mountain of others, stilettos used as weapons, to become Editor-in-chief of Gloss! And if she weren’t that woman, then she had nothing left, because work was all she had.
Romano didn’t know.
He’d never known.
She closed her eyes and heard a gentle roaring in her ears.
Would that have changed things? Would he have stood by her after all, despite the fact they’d been so young, despite the argument that had sent them spinning in different directions? A picture filled her mind and she didn’t have the strength to push it away: a young couple, awake long after midnight, looking drained but happy. He kissed her on the forehead and told her to climb back into the bed they shared, to get some sleep. He’d try and rock the baby to sleep.
No.
It wouldn’t have been like that, couldn’t have been. They couldn’t have lost their chance because of a few sheets of soggy paper.
She had to be real. Statistics were on her side. She was more likely to have been a harried single mother, burned out and bored out of her mind, while her friends dated and went to parties and were young and frivolous.
Yes. That picture was better. That would have been her reality. She had to hang onto that. But the tenderness in the young man’s eyes as he looked over the downy top of the baby’s head at its mother wouldn’t leave her alone.
She walked towards the window but kept back a little, just in case any of the family were milling on the terrace with their cocktails. She stared off into the sunset, which glowed as bright as embers in a fire, framing the undulating hills to the west. Tonight the sun looked so huge she could almost imagine it was setting into the crystal-clear lake that lay behind those hills. Where Romano probably was right now.
All these years she’d hated him. For nothing. What a waste of energy, of a life. Surely she must have had something better to do with her time than that? Maybe so, but nothing came to mind.
Slowly, quietly, she began to feel the right way up again. Get a grip, Jacqueline. You’re not a terrified fifteen-year-old now; you’re a powerful and successful woman. You can handle this.
Romano wasn’t the monster she’d needed to make him in her imagination. And he probably wasn’t the boy-father of her fantasies either. The truth probably lay somewhere in between.
She had to give him a chance to prove her wrong, to find out what the reality would be. He had a daughter on this planet, one who was hungry to know who she was and where she came from.
Jackie walked away from the window and sat back down on the edge of the bed. This changed all her plans. She couldn’t tell her family about her daughter’s existence yet. She had to tell Romano first. It was probably a bit late for cigars and slaps on the back, but he needed to know that he was a father.
Warm light filtered through the skylights in Romano’s studio, dancing across the walls as tiny puffy clouds played hide-and-seek with the sun, daring him to come out and play. That was one of the downsides of having a home office in a home like his. Distractions, major and minor, bombarded him from every direction. One of the reasons he’d accepted Lizzie’s wedding invitation was that it had given him a perfect excuse to spend two whole weeks at the palazzo. The plan had been to use the free time running up to and after the festivities to think about the next Puccini collection.
Just as he’d managed to dismiss the idea that the sky was laughing at him for sitting indoors working on a day like this, his mobile rang. He stood up with a growl of frustration.
He didn’t recognise the caller ID. ‘Hello?’
There was a slight pause, then a deep breath. ‘Romano?’
He stopped scowling and his eyebrows, no longer weighted down with a frown, arched high.
‘It’s Jackie,’ she said in English. ‘Jackie Patterson.’
It wasn’t lack of recognition that had delayed his reply, but surprise. After all these years her voice was still surprisingly familiar. It was her reasons for calling that had stalled him.
Why, when she’d been at pains to avoid him at all costs for the last couple of days—including that ridiculous show of some ‘secret’ lunch with Isabella and Scarlett—had she called him? As always, Jackie Patterson had him running in circles chasing his own tail. It was to his own shame that he liked it.
He smiled. ‘And to what do I owe the pleasure?’
There was a pause.
‘I believe you owe me lunch.’
He might be laid-back, but he wasn’t slow. She hadn’t actually agreed to lunch before she’d been whisked away.
He let it pass. If thirty-two-year-old Jackie was anything similar to her teenage counterpart, the starchy accusation was only the surface level of her remark. With Jackie, there were always layers. Something that had both bewitched him and infuriated him
during their brief summer fling. Her about-face could only mean one thing: Jackie wanted something. And that also intrigued him.
‘So I do,’ he said, injecting a lazy warmth into his voice that he knew would make her bristle. Jackie might like to play games, rather than come straight out and say what she thought and felt, but that didn’t mean he was going to lie down and let her win. The best part of a game was the competition, the cycle of move and counter-move, until there was only one final outcome. ‘Do you want to go to Rosa?’
‘No,’ she said, almost cutting the end of his sentence off. ‘Somewhere…quieter.’
Romano smiled. ‘Quieter’ could easily be interpreted as intimate.
‘Okay,’ he said slowly, letting her lead, letting her think she was in control.
He racked his brains to think of somewhere nice… quiet…to take Jackie. He doodled on a pad as he came up with, and rejected, five different restaurants. Too noisy. Bad food. Not the right ambience…
He looked out of the window, at the shady lawns and immaculate hedges. ‘You want to talk? In private?’
‘Yes.’
Did he detect a hint of wariness in her voice? Good. Jackie was always more fun when she was caught off guard. She always did something radical, something totally unexpected. He liked unexpected.
‘Come to the island, then,’ he said. ‘We’ll have all the quiet we want. We’ll eat here.’
There was a sharp laugh from Jackie. ‘What? You can cook?’ Her response reminded him of the way he’d used to tease her until she just couldn’t take it any more and had either walloped him or kissed him. He’d enjoyed both.
He laughed too. ‘You’ll just have to accept my invitation to find out.’
There was a not-so-gentle huff of displeasure in his ear.
He waited.
‘Okay.’ The word was accompanied by a resigned sigh. ‘You’re on.’
Jackie was on time. He hadn’t expected anything less. She parked a sleek car on a patch of scrubby grass near a little jetty on the shore of Lake Adrina, just south of Isola del Raverno. He had been waiting in a small speedboat tied at the end of the rough wooden structure. The gentle side-to-side motion lulled him as he watched her emerge from the car looking cool and elegant.