head, not wanting to hear some paltry platitude about how Emily Viale was happy now, watching her daughter from some celestial cloud. He took his thumb, damp with her tears, and touched it to his breastbone. ‘In here. Tua cuore.’ Your heart. And with another sad, fleeting smile, he had moved away.
She’d known then that he’d lost his father a few years before. Even so, she hadn’t realized another person could understand her so perfectly. How someone—a stranger—had been able to say exactly the right thing. How later, when she wept scalding tears into her pillow, wept until she felt she’d be sick from it and her mind and body and heart all felt wrung, wasted, she’d remember his words.
It’s all right to cry.
He’d helped her to grieve. And when the pain had, if not stopped, then at least lessened, she’d wanted to tell him that. She’d wanted to say thank you, and she supposed she’d wanted to see if he still understood her. Understood her more, even, than before. And she’d wanted to discover if she, perhaps, understood him too. A ridiculous notion, when that passing comment was the only conversation they’d ever really shared.
Over the years, she’d almost—almost—forgotten about Vittorio’s words at her mother’s graveside. Yet in that second when she’d seen him again, every frail, childish hope had leapt to life within her and she’d thought—she’d actually believed—that he remembered. That it had meant something.
Her pathetic foolishness, even if only for a second, annoyed her. She wasn’t romantic or a dreamer; any dreams of romance—love, even—she’d once entertained as a child had died out years ago, doused by the hard reality of boarding school, when she’d been a picked-on pigeon among swans. Ana’s mouth twisted cynically. Perhaps not a pigeon, but a swallow, a plain and unprepossessing bird, after all.
They’d flickered briefly back to life in her university days, enough so that she had been willing to take a risk with Roberto.
That had been a mistake.
And, just now, the moment Vittorio Ralfino’s mouth had tightened in disdain and then uttered words Anamaria knew to be false…the last faint, frail hope she hadn’t even known she’d still possessed had flickered out completely. Mockery or lies. She didn’t know which. It hardly mattered.
Anamaria took another sip of wine and turned to smile at another winemaker—Busato, a man in his sixties with hair like cotton wool and a smile as kind as that of Babbo Natale. As one of the few female winemakers in the room, she appreciated his kindness, as well as his respect. And, she told herself firmly, she would dismiss Vittorio Cazlevara completely from her mind, as he had undoubtedly dismissed her from his. A few words exchanged nearly seventeen years ago hardly mattered now. She wouldn’t be surprised if Vittorio didn’t remember them; it certainly shouldn’t hurt. He’d merely been offering her a few pleasantries, scraps tossed from his opulent table, no doubt, and she vowed not to give them a second thought.
A light gleamed in one of the downstairs windows of Villa Rosso as she headed up the curving drive. Her father was waiting for her, as he always did when she went to these events; just a few years ago he would have gone with her, but now he chose to leave such things entirely to her. He claimed she needed her independence, but Anamaria suspected the socialising tired him. He was, by nature, a quiet and studious man.
‘Ana?’ His voice carried from the study as she entered the villa and slipped off her coat.
‘Yes, Papà?’
‘Tell me about the tasting. Was everyone there?’
‘Everyone important,’ she called back, entering the study with a smile, ‘except you.’
‘Bah, flattery.’ Her father sat in a deep leather armchair by the fireplace; a fire crackled in the hearth to ward off the night’s chill. A book lay forgotten in his lap and he took off his reading spectacles to look at her, his thin, lined face creasing into a smile. ‘You needn’t say such things to me.’
‘I know,’ she replied, sitting across from him and slipping off her shoes, ‘and so I should, since I was the subject of a flatterer myself tonight.’
‘Oh?’ He shut his book and laid it on the side table, next to his spectacles. ‘What do you mean?’
She hadn’t meant to mention Vittorio. She’d been trying to forget him, after all. Yet somehow he’d slipped right into their conversation before it had even started, and it couldn’t even surprise her because, really, hadn’t he been