The One in My Heart

by Sherry Thomas

  “Have you been there?”

  “No, but I have friends who rave about it.”

  And would one of those friends be Frances Somerset, who will be there shortly, and whose anniversary date you probably checked now to make sure that it fell on the same weekend?

  Zelda moved closer to me and played the slide show from the hotel’s website. “Isn’t it gorgeous? Used to be a small private palazzo before it was turned into a boutique establishment. And you can get a pretty decent rate this time of year. They aren’t officially open—February is when they train their staff for the season.”

  “You know a lot about a hotel you’ve never stayed at.”

  I’d met hotel aficionados who traveled with the express purpose of experiencing the best in hospitality, but Zelda had never been one of those: She was fine as long as a place was clean and convenient.

  “Well, you hear things,” Zelda answered rather vaguely. “Anyway, I’ve sent you the link. Think about it.”

  The kettle sang. Zelda set aside the iPad and went back to the kitchen. She returned a few minutes later with a teapot and a plate of dried apple rings. “You know, it’s a bit ironic how things have turned out.”

  “You mean that the Somerset boy and I should have met after all.”

  “And that he should be completely smitten with you.” Zelda sat down and poured. “I never told you this, but I suspected for years that the Somersets had something to do with your invitation to the Bal des Debutantes.”

  I reached for my cup, forgetting that I’d already had plenty of hot liquids for the evening. “Why?”

  “You know your father wanted it desperately for you—well, for the prestige of the Canterburys, if we’re being completely honest with ourselves. And I really wanted it for him, as a parting gift if nothing else. But it was always a long shot—the Canterburys aren’t what they were, and I’m just a lot of people’s third cousin.

  “I remember telling all this to Frances—we were getting to know each other then. We talked about you and she came away impressed. Said she’d love for her son to meet you, except that he was all the way in England.

  “No one knew anything then about the older woman—we thought he was at Eton because he wanted to be. So I told her that if you were selected for the Bal des Debutantes, he could hop over for a weekend and serve as your escort, and wouldn’t that be a fun way for the two of you to meet.

  “Frances agreed with me. The moment I told her of your selection, she asked if she could still volunteer her son as your escort. I said yes, absolutely. Of course, he didn’t come, but it was only after a while that I put two and two together.

  “Imagine that you are Frances and Rowland Somerset and you really, really want to remove your son from that awful older woman. But you know what young men in love are like—the more you bad-mouth their beloved, the more they dig in their heels. A much better fix would be to introduce him to someone else, someone who is essentially perfect—not to mention his own age—and hope that he’ll come to see what he’s been missing.”

  Zelda had an exaggerated concept of my perfection, and I’d long ago given up trying to correct her. “So the Somersets wanted to dangle me as a lure?”

  “That’s my theory, at least. It was too bad his eighteenth birthday fell on the day of the rehearsal and he bailed—could have saved himself and everybody else a lot of trouble.”

  “You think he’d have taken one look at me and dropped all his plans for California?”

  “I thought it was—what do Americans call it?—a Hail Mary pass. But now I’m not sure everything wouldn’t have worked exactly as they’d hoped. The boy is clearly wild about you.”

  I shrugged—and wished I didn’t know better. It would have been a compelling narrative: the near miss, the long years apart, the accidental meeting, the fierce, instant attraction—the wedding announcement in the Sunday Times supplement all but wrote itself.

  “By the way, he has plans to visit Mrs. Asquith on the way back, and he asked me to join him.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Zelda said immediately. “I’ll ring her to let her know you’re coming. She’s been curious about you for ages.”

  We talked some more about Mrs. Asquith before we said good night to each other.

  As I brushed my teeth, I picked apart Zelda’s reaction. She was happy that I’d meet Mrs. Asquith at last. Mixed in, though, was a certain strain: Was she anxious that I’d learn too much of her past from her godmother?

  But as I settled into bed, my mind drifted to Zelda’s revelation about the Somersets and their possible string-pulling to get me to the ball. I couldn’t narrow it down to anything specific she’d said; nor could I put a name to exactly what I was feeling.

  I only knew that as I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling, something chafed in my heart—and chafed badly.

  Chapter 7

  MUNICH, OTHER THAN THE ABSENCE of Bennett, went off almost exactly as I’d imagined. The paper I presented was well received. After a celebratory lunch with my collaborators that lasted three hours and left me a bit tipsy on Bavaria’s famous beers, I went for a walk in the Englischer Garten—in the snow.

  In fact, it snowed the entire time I was in Munich. By contrast, Naples, where I landed Friday afternoon, enjoyed a clear blue sky and bright, lovely sunshine.

  My fake boyfriend waited for me at the luggage claim, in a gorgeously cut black trench coat worn open over a black suit that probably had Tom Ford’s name on it. He was leaning against a row of seats, his eyes on his phone, and something about his posture was extraordinarily sexy—the relaxed shoulders, the slight slouch, the perfectly angled lines of his legs. I’d seen professional models on thirty-foot-high billboards who couldn’t project half this much easy confidence.

  Aspirational beauty, I suddenly thought. What he presented to the world was exactly the kind of magnetic stylishness luxury brands tried to associate with their products, the kind that made people anxious to wear the same clothes and sport the same watch, because they couldn’t help wanting to emulate that powerful allure.

  Because the assumption was that such a powerful allure could represent only the epitome of success and happiness.

  Except he was a man who couldn’t go home. Who couldn’t even tell anyone, other than his fake girlfriend, that he wanted to go home.

  After our first meeting, I’d been convinced he was made of rainbow and moon dust. At the end of our second meeting I’d come away feeling upended—he had been scheming, relentless, and possibly even unscrupulous in getting what he wanted from me.

  But as he looked up and smiled, my heart quivered with a strange affinity: I understood what it was like to present an image to the world—and to be so good at it that no one ever questioned that image.

  He came forward, took my carry-on bag, and kissed me on the lips. “I’ve missed you.”

  The desire that coursed through me was painful in its intensity. I dug through my tote for a pair of sunglasses, pretending to be unaffected. “Very convincing. Did you take acting lessons while you were out in California?”

  “Sweetheart, I had a SAG card at one point.”

  I looked at him. “Seriously?”

  The Screen Actors Guild did not give out those cards willy-nilly.

  “My ex made films.”

  “What kind of films?”

  He grinned. “You look suspicious, Professor. Are you worried I might have porn on my résumé?”

  I pitched a brow. “Doesn’t everybody in California have porn on their résumés?”

  “In SoCal, maybe. But one of my ex’s short films was nominated for an Oscar—so at least you know not everything she made was porn.”

  I was astonished. For a filmmaker to receive such a nod was a huge accomplishment, even if it wasn’t for a feature film.

  “Were you in that film?” If he was, then I’d easily find out her identity.

  “That was after we split.”

  Still, I had to restrain my urge to start G
oogling right away.

  Outside the airport, the temperature was a good bit cooler than the brilliant sunshine would have suggested. Bennett turned up the collar of his coat. Even though I understood now that his appearance was part of a facade, I still sucked in a breath—there was something innately stylish about my boyfriend.

  It took me a moment to realize I’d forgotten to think of him as my fake boyfriend.

  He told me he’d flown in the previous day and spent the night in Naples. He’d also borrowed a car from a friend, which happened to be an adorkable little silver BMW i3.

  “You do enjoy an electric vehicle,” I said as he opened the door for me.

  “I’m very fond of them, but I like my bicycles even more.”

  “I expected as much from a West Coast hippie.”

  He laughed. “It really is great to see you, Evangeline.”

  And just like that, more butterflies in my stomach than at a botanical garden in spring. I switched the topic to his work, and he in turn asked about the Munich conference.

  The landscape was dominated by the great green cone of Mount Vesuvius. And just when I thought we had driven past it, the road turned west along the coast of the Sorrentine Peninsula, and the massive volcano came back into view again across the blue waters of the Gulf of Naples.

  The foothills of Monti Lattari rose sharply to our south. The road was etched where the mountain met the sea, a narrow two-lane highway that drivers mistook for a stretch of the Formula One race. Then the hills dropped away briefly. The road turned south and cut across the peninsula toward the Amalfi Coast.

  “Have you been here before?” I asked Bennett, as he seemed to take Italian roads—and drivers—completely in stride.

  “Long ago. Somebody in the extended family has a house on Lake Como. We used to spend summers there—and come south once in a while for sightseeing.”

  “Were those summers idyllic or idyllically awful?”

  “Lake Como is unbelievably gorgeous and I used to be unbelievably bored. I was sulky and ungrateful and in general drove my dad crazy.”

  He took the car up a steep incline, driving with a quiet competence that made me want to have his hands on me, touching me everywhere. I bit the inside of my cheek and looked out the window.

  We’d gained elevation. The road clung to the side of hills, twisting and winding like lines on a topographic map. Vapors billowed across small valleys—the weather had turned foggy. Ocher roofs peeked out occasionally, and here and there the ruins of an ancient fortification high up the slopes.

  “Speaking of driving my dad crazy,” Bennett said after the i3 took its first hairpin turn, “I should let you know I’m expecting trouble on that front.”

  His tone, more than his words, made me glance at him. “What kind of trouble?”

  “My ex passed away last October. There’s going to be an exhibit of her work fairly soon, and chances are it’ll include pictures she took of me—naked pictures.”

  I should have been more concerned by the probability of naked pictures of him coming to light, but it was the ex’s death that caught my attention—October was so recent. “Did you attend her funeral?”

  “I was on the West Coast for a few days.”

  I couldn’t detect any particular inflection to his voice. All the same, my stomach dropped. Did he still love her? “You gave her eulogy?”

  “No, I didn’t have any special role. Her brother gave one eulogy, her longtime camerawoman the other.”

  “She never married?”

  “She did at one point, after we broke up. But it lasted only a couple of years.”

  Which was too bad—a husband acting as the executor of her estate might be more reluctant to exhibit naked pictures she’d taken of another man.

  The road veered around the edge of a hill and dropped down—we had crossed the peninsula and were now on the Amalfi Coast. The descent twisted and pivoted; a thick fog nuzzled the sheer cliffs.

  “So when do you expect the other shoe to drop?” I asked.

  “Weekend after next.”

  “What? Is there a nudity clause in our contract that says I can back out if and when naked pictures of you surface?”

  He snorted. “Sorry, sweetheart. You’re mine for the next four and a half months.”

  I swallowed—I’d rarely heard scarier words. But was I afraid those four and a half months would be too long—or too short?

  “You know a lot about me,” he said. “Is there anything I need to know about you, so I don’t sound ignorant in front of my parents? Any significant past relationships?”

  “No.” And I didn’t know a lot about him. Not enough, in any case.

  “A straight-up no?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve never dated anyone for longer than three months.”

  “Why not?”

  I exhaled. One would think my allergy to anyone really getting to know me would be the reason that I couldn’t stay in a relationship, but actually it had been mostly preempted by another, equally significant cause.

  The Vermont farmer.

  My parents divorced when I was two. My mother died seven years later. Her funeral marked the only time I ever remembered seeing her in person, a beautiful woman with too much makeup on her face, her hand literally ice-cold.

  From what I could piece together, Mother and her second husband, whom she married the day after her divorce became final, had begun their relationship while she was still married to Pater. The affair was documented by private detectives Pater had hired, and because of that, he was able to get the judge to grant him sole custody of me.

  That, however, didn’t explain why she chose not to exercise her visitation rights. She sent letters and presents, but never herself. To make sense of things, I invented a fairy tale for her—and for me—as I pored over pictures of her with her husband, a Vermont farmer with a face as brown and craggy as a Sherpa’s.

  I imagined that this beautiful new marriage of hers so angered Pater that he exiled her forever from my life—and I accepted her banishment in the cause of true love. Her rugged, hirsute husband came to stand for all that was wildly manly and romantic in the world, the guarantor of happiness, the knight on a shining John Deere tractor.

  Eventually I learned that when she’d died unexpectedly from bacterial meningitis, she had already separated from the Vermont farmer. But the damage was done. When I was sixteen I fell desperately in love with a boy named Jonathan—who had very little going for him except that at eighteen he’d managed to grow a full, luxuriant beard like the one my mother’s husband had sported.

  Every man I’d dated since had some trait that could be linked back to this fairy-tale man I’d never met. There was David in college, who fascinated me because he was an actual Vermont farm boy. There was Nick, also in college, whose collection of plaid shirts rivaled Mother’s husband’s. And there was Alex, who gave me palpitations because he knew carpentry—Mother had sent many photographs of rocking chairs, bookshelves, and once even a loom that her husband had made for her with his own hands.

  But the Vermont-farmer fixation also had a flip side: Once I understood that my attraction to these men was but my psyche still acting up from the misplaced yearnings of my childhood, my crushes would peter out as quickly as they’d come to be, before a man had time to figure out I never told him anything about myself.

  The older I got, the easier it became for me to see the Vermont-farmer connection. Sometimes I could spot it within a few minutes of that first stirring of interest. As a result, that interest would quietly die down, with a sigh and a shrug from me.

  Bennett was a complete outlier: I kept dissecting his appearance and lifestyle, and there was nothing of the Vermont farmer to him. He might, in fact, be the anti-Vermont farmer.

  And it scared me that I had no idea how to get over him.

  “I like being single,” I said.

  “I know people who genuinely enjoy being unattached. They are not the ones who get melancholy at weddings.
”

  My gut tightened. I wasn’t used to anyone seeing me in my less guarded moments. “I wasn’t melancholy, just contemplative.”

  The car rounded another sharp curve. “You, Professor, lie like a rug.”

  I could only be thankful that our road, hemmed in by cliffs on one side and overhanging a deep plunge into the fog-shrouded sea on the other, required all Bennett’s attention. Or he might have seen me flinch.

  I also wasn’t used to being called out on my lies.

  But I did have a few tactics for moving away from subjects that I didn’t want to discuss. “My romantic history doesn’t matter. What I want to know is why, with the threat of naked pictures hanging over your head, you took so long to get things moving? I mean, you were going out with Damaris Vandermeer’s friend back in summer—that’s a crowd of women who would have been perfect for your purpose. If one didn’t work out, why didn’t you try another?”

  “First, there was no threat of naked pictures last summer. Even after my ex passed away, in the beginning it seemed like it’d take a while for the retrospective to get off the ground. It was only after the New Year that I heard differently.

  “Second, I didn’t go out with Damaris Vandermeer’s friend. We met a few times for coffee. And I did check out the other women in that circle. But like I told you, they wouldn’t have worked.”

  I studied him. His profile was as dramatic and chiseled as the cliffs to which the road clung—and about as revealing. “Am I really your only score since you moved to the East Coast?”

  I couldn’t have asked such a question back in December. But that was before he shoved a shit-ton of money my way.

  The corners of his lips curved. “Are you feeling sorry for me? Please say you are.”

  My heart skipped a beat. “No, I only ever feel sorry for the masturbation couch. It probably had greater ambitions in life. I’ll bet it gives you the side-eye every time you sit down, thinking, ‘Motherfucker, how hard can it be to get laid these days?’”

  He laughed. “True, not very. But I don’t want my parents to get the idea that I’m a slut. They should believe that when I’m not saving lives, I’m making out with you in elevators.”