of the airport and Nick was on the other?’
‘Turn back around and keep walking?’ I said, still breathless. ‘Oh Jesus Christ, they’re not are they?’ I hardly dared move.
‘Well, Charlie isn’t,’ she shrugged. ‘And since you apparently managed to spend a week in playing photographer without taking a single bloody shot of Mr Miller, I don’t know what he looks like, do I?’
‘If you’re going to tell me you haven’t googled him,’ I nodded at the driver as we trotted towards him, overly excited to see my own name badly written in wonky black marker, ‘I’m going to call you a liar.’
‘Do you have any idea how many Nick Millers there are in the world?’ Amy said. ‘Not including a character in a very popular sitcom?’
‘A few?’
Secretly, I was pleased that she’d had a hard time finding him. If Amy had got so much as a peek at Nick, we wouldn’t be in Milan right now. We’d be wherever in the world he might be so she could hunt him down and force us down the aisle with a shotgun.
‘You’re a pain in my arse, Brookes,’ she muttered. ‘I never tell you a story without visual aids.’
‘Yeah, and if you could stop texting me pictures of your one-night stands while they’re sleeping, that would be brilliant,’ I replied.
With a big wide smile, Amy turned and gave me a double thumbs up.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘That’s brilliant.’
‘Remind me again why I brought you with me?’ I asked my alleged best friend, fighting the urge to punch her in the face.
‘Because you love me,’ she said, weaving her arm through mine, as our driver piled our bags onto a trolley. ‘And you couldn’t possibly survive another adventure without me.’
‘Totally should have brought Paige,’ I mumbled to myself as we walked out of the air-conditioned airport into a heat that almost made me crumble to my denim-clad knees. So this was the seventh circle of ovary-hanging hell Veronica had talked about.
‘Warm out,’ Amy said, sliding on her sunglasses. ‘This is going to be fun.’
‘It’s going to be something,’ I replied, looking for my own sunglasses in my handbag and having a sudden flashback to leaving them on top of Amy’s dresser in the rush to get her out and into the taxi that had been waiting for us for twenty minutes. ‘It’s definitely going to be something.’
‘Oh my God!’
Amy hadn’t stopped talking since customs so it was a testament to just how impressive Bertie Bennett’s Italian home was that it had managed to shut her up so successfully. Even when I had explained that the clouds that looked so much like mountains were, in fact, mountains, she hadn’t stopped for breath so the look of dazed amazement that had come over her now was wonderful to behold for many reasons. From a best-friend perspective, I was happy to see her look so happy. From a human-being perspective, I could have cried with joy at the first moment of silence in over an hour.
As the car pulled off the road and a pair of huge iron gates swung open to allow us inside, I pressed my fingertips against the window of the car. When I’d arrived at Bertie Bennett’s house in Hawaii, I thought I had accidentally wandered into heaven. The wonderful modernist architecture, the sea, the sand, the way the air smelled so sweet and welcoming. But this was something else; this was like something I had only seen in fairytales. One moment we were on a perfectly normal-looking city street while Amy regaled the driver with tales of her latest urinary tract infection and the next we were sitting in complete silence and rolling into the courtyard of the most beautiful, stately building I had ever seen.
When I was sixteen, my entire class had gone on a school trip to London and I distinctly remembered being more than a little bit disappointed by Buckingham Palace. Not that it wasn’t impressive; but my imagination had been ruined by too many Disney movies, so it had too many corners and not enough turrets for my liking. But this place? Al’s Milan pied-à-terre made Buck House look like a two-up, two-down council house.
It wasn’t that it was enormous or sprawling or set in acres of artfully landscaped grounds, it was just impossibly beautiful. The house was elegant and simple with so many big, sparkling windows I couldn’t even count them all. Everything was symmetrical, which brought out the ecstatic OCD in me and I kept looking up to the top floor, expecting to see a princess combing out her hair on one of the balconies. Passing through the gate, the car came to a halt in the courtyard, a stone fountain bubbling away in the centre, more archways leading off to small but perfectly formed manicured lawns, decorated with trees and plants. Gorgeous to look at, but just like his super-modern home in Hawaii, entirely inviting. Nothing about this storybook palace said ‘do not touch’; it was far more ‘feel free to take off your shoes and run around barefoot and would you like a bottle of wine and a straw while you’re doing that?’
A white-glove-wearing footman opened the passenger door and I climbed out of the car, eyes still skyward, taking in each of the three levels of Al’s second home. Unlike Hawaii, there was endless activity behind each of the arched windows. I could see people rushing around from one room to the next, curtains pulled back and windows thrown open. Clearly, someone was in a rush to get ready for something.
‘Tess?’ Amy peered at me over the top of the car, wavering on her tiptoes. ‘Are we in the right place?’
‘I don’t know about you,’ I replied, watching the huge wooden double door creak open to reveal a familiar face. ‘But I’m pretty bloody sure that I am.’
‘My darling!’ A short, handsome man with coffee-coloured skin and impeccably parted jet-black hair rushed across the courtyard, barrelling past assorted staff members who were trying to go about their business, and scooped me up in an impressive hug. Mostly impressive because I was at least five inches taller than him. ‘Aloha!’
‘Kekipi!’ I hoped he wouldn’t find the fact I still had my feet on the ground as awkward as I did. ‘Aloha.’
Nestling his head into my boobs, he looked up at me and grinned. Apparently he did not find it awkward at all. ‘Now are we Tess or Vanessa today?’
‘Tess,’ I said quickly. ‘Today, tomorrow and until the end of the world.’
‘That could be tomorrow if things don’t calm down in there.’ He gestured back towards the house before turning his attention to Amy.
My bestie was vibrating with barely restrained giddiness and not for the first time since I’d invited her along on this trip, I wondered whether introducing the two of them was, in fact, an incredibly bad idea.
‘You must be Amy the Assistant.’ He decided to forego the formalities of introductions and planted two big kisses on Amy’s cheeks. ‘I like you already, you make me look tall.’
The first time I met Kekipi, it had been in an entirely official capacity and even though the pretence of professionalism fell by the wayside relatively quickly, something was definitely different this time. Gone was the black uniform he had sported as the estate manager of Bertie Bennett’s Hawaiian hideout, and in its place was a bright aqua-blue trousers and hot-pink shirt combo. In fact, Kekipi’s shirt coordinated with Amy’s jeans so well, you would have been forgiven for thinking they had planned their outfits together. Which I imagined would be happening daily from tomorrow morning.
‘We’re so glad you decided to come,’ Kekipi said, waving for two men in light grey trousers and white shirts, apparently the official ensembles of the Milanese Bennett household, to whisk our suitcases out of sight. ‘It’s been a very dramatic week. Senior and Junior have not been getting along at all and Senior is having what can only be described as one of his “artistic” moments.’
‘Is that good?’ I asked, following him into the entranceway of the house. Kekipi pursed his lips and shook his head.
I’d met Al’s son, Artie, in Hawaii and he was a curious man