There Is More Light Than Dark

Chapter Twenty Eight

Sunday July 23

The first week of my stay with Valentina felt every bit like I needed it to. Just me and her, and Carlotta skulking around the edges. We hadn't done anything yet, Valentina and I, but we both knew it was close. We'd ride our bikes into the township and sit with a pinot, looking into the sun and laughing. It was like she knew exactly what I had gone through. It was like she was the antidote for all of the terrible things life had until now thrown at me.

If Avery had been my great love, then Val was my everything. It would be wrong to say I'd tired of Avery but, to be honest, the timing of what had happened had at the very least been serendipitous. I mean, Valentina could have been swept up by any other man this side of London.

The fact that everything had happened and now it was me here, awestruck by her big brown eyes and velvet skin – well, that said to me it was meant to be.

And after everything else I had endured I was pretty good at living in the moment. Dwelling on things only ever brought pain, and that pain was always worse than it was the first time around.

On the sixth night I had had a bath and was sitting outside my bedroom with a cold espresso when I heard her padding along the sandstone that fringed the house. For a second I felt like it might have been Carlotta – something about the way her feet fell on the ground – but then her yellow dress wafted around the corner and I smiled. Maybe this was going to be it.

As I stood up and went to meet her, she beckoned me to stay sitting on the grass as I was. I finished the coffee and took my glasses off as the sun ended its day off to the west, behind her. She sat with her legs curled beside her off to my right, her arm next to mine as we sat close. The heady scent of her perfume and her sweet winy breath made her feel like she was closer still. The vines and the rolling hills that stretched off like they were part of this living, breathing heaven I had found watched as she came close enough to me that her lips were resting on mine.

Valentina Pisano paused as if she needed me to be touching the very energy this place seemed to pulse with before she reached into my shorts to confirm I was as ready as she was.

We lay and writhed slowly as if to pay homage to what was happening; as if to soak in what might just be the start of the rest of everything for both of us. And her lips swelled and tasted sweet as she finished and her yellow dress flapped lightly in the breeze that surrounded us.

And so, for the next week whole afternoons would pass in mere seconds of sun and skin, the two of us completely enraptured in life and each other. Through vine leaves and sleepy eyes we'd watch the grapes sit and ripen, talk about Bach and Caravaggio and whether the moon appeared brighter when life was happier.

It was the first time I had ever thought about what might have gone before for her. It was the first time I'd ever thought that she hadn't always been so happy.

Val started to talk about her father and how he had died three years before. She cried when she talked of Carlotta and how she had been the one to cope and go on running the farm and the vineyard but how she could still feel her broken heart through her thick skin – a void where her Sergio would never be replaced.

Carlotta didn't come over to the main house often in that first week when I was there, but I felt her eyes watch me closely when she did. And I felt her thick heaving pain even when she didn't know I was behind the curtain, watching her. She was a lot like Valentina but she had hard edges that she used to scrape away feelings she tried to ignore. I knew, I'd done the same for a long time.

And after Georgina and the mess that created I was certain to not let her get to me.

Avery never knew how Doug and I had protected her from all of that.

And so Carlotta would hold my eyes long after I'd finished what I had to say. She'd pretend she was waiting for the kettle to boil on the stovetop when Val and I were sitting together on the divan planning and pretending our future was better and closer than it was ever going to be.

And then on the night Valentina told me about Lola I swear Carlotta was standing in the doorway of my bedroom as Val and I fucked to make up for the surprise she'd sprung.

The next day Lola arrived and I knew, I just knew that Mason Stepper would not be too far behind. Because I'd been lazy and happy and I'd allowed myself to think that the shit that had always followed me might be just a vestige of the place I'd been stuck in.

But I knew he wouldn't leave me alone until something bigger still happened and any chance of me thinking about a future that exchanged peace for retribution was only ever a dream.