decided whether or not you’re ever speaking to me again?”
“Ethan had his chance to explain.” Maya was proud of how cool she sounded. How unaffected. Thank God Lorraine couldn’t see how she shook where she sat. “Of course, some of that was lost in the unfortunate business of canceling our wedding an hour before the ceremony started. I think there was an explanation in there somewhere, but to be honest, it’s a blur. And I’ve known you a whole lot longer.”
Another long pause. The Lorraine Maya knew would have been weeping, because she was always weeping. Anything she felt, she cried out in great sobs, tears tracking down her cheeks in rivers.
But maybe all of that had been an act. It was entirely possible she’d never known Lorraine at all.
“We didn’t mean to hurt you,” Lorraine said, just when Maya was starting to think she wouldn’t say anything else.
“But you see, you must have meant to hurt me,” Maya said. Softly. Very, very softly, the words were coming out of her, though she had no idea where she was going—which was counter to everything she had ever learned about the art of argument in law school. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “Because if you didn’t want to hurt me, you wouldn’t have. It’s that simple.”
“It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t...”
Maya waited. But it didn’t seem as if Lorraine was going to speak again. Or maybe she was fighting the same wallop of regret and self-recrimination, guilt and fury, that Maya was.
She could feel that stinging at the back of her throat again, like a scream that had nowhere to go. And then something far bigger than a scream rolled into her. Through her. A grief so big and wide and impossible that she wondered it didn’t tear her apart where she sat.
The rain started then, little drops that felt like a tickle, but she didn’t move.
She remembered their first day at university. When all the hubbub had subsided, they were left alone in the room they were expected to share for a year. Maya could see Lorraine as she’d been back then as if she was standing before her all over again. Lorraine had been almost gangly then, though Maya could see that only when she looked at old pictures. At the time she’d thought Lorraine was beautiful, so enviably skinny where Maya was curvy, with the long, straight black hair and dark olive skin of her Persian father and light green eyes of her French-Canadian mother.
This is going to be great, eighteen-year-old Maya had promised the stranger before her, who had struck her as terrified. Maybe she’d made that up, too. Maybe she’d caused all of this from the start. We’re going to be best friends.
And they had been, which wasn’t to say they’d always gotten along. Some years, Maya had wondered if they only even spoke anymore because she had made that proclamation. Maya had followed the path that had always been laid out so carefully before her. Lorraine had...drifted. Maya had remembered their first day a thousand times since then, sometimes with nostalgia, sometimes with irritation. She’d wondered what would have happened if they’d been placed with other first-year roommates instead of with each other.
But today, on a rainy afternoon in a tiny fishing village in Italy, the memory made her nothing but sad.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Lorraine said again.
“It doesn’t matter what you meant,” Maya replied. “Because you did.”
And that grief was too much in her voice, so she ended the call. She waited until she was sure her knees wouldn’t give out on her, and then she stood. The rain was coming harder now, but there was a part of her that welcomed it. Rain on her head felt...right, somehow. She ran her espresso cup back into the café, then found herself outside again, and she couldn’t tell if the rain was in her face or if her eyes were blurred for a different reason.
She half walked, half ran for the little tunnel dug out beneath one of the buildings, this old village like a labyrinth built vertically, twisting and turning and piled high on itself. She plunged herself into the shadows, only to find that escaping the rain didn’t make her able to see any better.
Maya let out a sound she didn’t want to admit she could make, then picked up her pace. She kept her head down, telling herself that people had cried on these stones since the days of the Roman Empire. Her grief over one or two relationships that had ended terribly—and all at once—was nothing compared to the things others must have cried about here.
Not that it helped.
And when she nearly slammed into a person coming in the opposite direction, she tried to duck around and lunge for the rainy, gray daylight a few feet away—
But he caught her.
And she knew it was Charlie in the same second she came up hard against his chest.
The last thing in the world she wanted to do was let someone look at her. Especially this beautiful, lazy, entirely too relaxed, American handyman she never should have met, much less touched.
“You look a little too serious for someone who’s supposed to be on vacation,” he said, the low rumble of his voice reminding her of a motorcycle or one of the Italian sports cars that took the winding roads through these villages much too fast. She could feel it inside her, like an earthquake.
It made her eyes blur even more, and she didn’t know which one of them she hated more just then, her or him. Maya swiped at her eyes and focused on Charlie, scowling at him.
He was too beautiful. He wore a leather jacket against the weather and looked like something out of an old movie with his perfect mouth, that golden beard over his perfectly sculpted chin and the rain making his blond hair both darker than usual and brighter where the gray light caught it.
“This is an accidental vacation,” she threw at him, that scream in her throat making her voice harsh. “It was supposed to be my honeymoon. He broke the news that he wanted my best friend instead while there were already guests waiting in the chapel. I decided that was humiliating enough and came here. Where sometimes I can’t tell if it’s raining on me or if I’m grieving something that obviously wasn’t real in the first place.”
His grip got tighter. His eyes blazed, the blue almost too bright and fierce. Then his mouth firmed into a hard line.
“Sounds like you had a lucky escape,” he said, and then he very carefully released her and took a step back.
And as betrayals went, especially lately, this one hardly made the list.
But something inside Maya snapped. She actually felt it crack and was amazed he didn’t comment on the fact she was now ripped wide-open right there in front of him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and there was no modifying her voice. There was no containing this or making it sound calm when it wasn’t. “Is that more information than you wanted? Am I too much? Too intense?”
“It’s not my business.”
“I just made it your business.”
Charlie’s gaze went glacial. “Maybe if you go lie down or hang out in that pool of yours for a while, you’ll feel better.”
She laughed at that, a wild, unhinged sort of sound, and it was amazing how little she cared that she was making a spectacle of herself out here where anyone could happen by and see it. “Really? You think a nap is going to make me forget my called-off wedding and the fact the two people who were supposed to love me the most in the entire world were betraying me behind my back for who knows how long?”
He held his hands up in a gesture of surrender that, on him, looked like an invitation to further aggression. Maya doubted he’d ever surrendered to anything in his whole life. Something she would have said about herself, too—until now. Because there was something about Charlie that made her question her own strength. There was something about him that made her want to pile all her problems—and herself—on his big, strong shoulders and let him carry it all.
She’d