Page 58 of These Thin Lines

“Oh, Vi. I don’t know why I thought you’d be different. Just because you saw me? Simply because I thought you wantedmeand nottheChiara?”

“I did!” Vi’s voice broke even as the tears seemed unstoppable now. “I do, Chiara… I love you.”

Chiara stood very still, then turned away.

“There’s nothing I can do about that, Cinderella.”

Closing the door with a soft click that might as well have been a gunshot, Chiara walked out of Vi’s life. The sound jolted Vi from her stupor.

She looked around and from her position, she could make out the rumpled bed, the tangled sheets where they’d loved each other. God, she was so stupid, so naïve… Hadn’t Chiara called her that only hours ago? It seemed like a lifetime.

She’d really added insult to Chiara’s already injured pride. And perhaps not just her pride, because this was a betrayal of the highest order. All of Chiara’s pain, all of Chiara’s humiliation, out there for the entire world to see. How must she have felt, be feeling?

Vi wiped her face. The tears had somehow stopped. Perhaps she had no more to shed.

Maybe if she explained? Should she confess? Could she risk her father facing repercussions and ostracization? Vi thought that she should run. Should catch up with Chiara. What they had was real. Surely Chiara didn’t believe Vi was capable of betraying her like this?

Even as her heart told her that Chiara very much believed her to be this perfidious, and even if the thudding muscle was bleeding with both insult and pain, Vi took two steps towards the front door to go after Chiara, when a sudden pain lanced her foot. Broken glass. Her mother’s portrait.

Another step on autopilot and another piece of glass made her stumble and cry out. Blood pooling beneath her feet, Vi just watched the front door, willing it to open. Praying Chiara would hear her, would come back for her.

With a shout, she pulled a glass shard from her skin and, watching blood seep from her foot, slowly closed her eyes and sunk to the floor. Seconds later she slid out of consciousness.

Well, whatever she had thought about the rest of her life back on the rooftop of Rue Saint-Honoré, it was certainly proving to be rather painful.

PARTII

SHADOW

14

IN A FARAWAY LAND OF THORNY MEMORIES

Chiara Conti’s life bore some resemblance to a fairytale. For one, she always tried very hard to be good at a lot of things. And she could honestly say that she thought she was successful. You name it; she was told she was fabulous at that particular thing.

Supermodel? You bet. After all, her name was spoken in the same breath as Claudia Schiffer and Linda Evangelista.

The talent behind a multi-million dollar empire? Well, she had kept Lilien Haus in the top ten of the world’s fashion brands for two decades—whether it was public knowledge or not.

And for two, there was that thing she thought she excelled at most—being somebody’s wife… Just like in a fairytale, in a crushing blow, it turned out she hadn’t been all that good atthat, after all. If her own, now former, wife was to be believed…

In fact, the déjà vu of trying exceedingly hard to be very good and not succeeding, even by a long shot, was massive. It was both shocking and not at all. After all, it mirrored her childhood all over again. Her mother working herself to the bone to send her to university, only to realize that Chiara would never be graduating. Not from her village school. And not from anywhere else, for that matter.

“I’m not even going to offer any pennies for those thoughts.”

Aoife swaggered in, a spring in her step, arms full of ivory satin and lace, and Chiara looked up from the sketch at her workstation. The paper was full of doodles instead of any actual designs, and she had no idea when she’d lost her train of thought and gone down the rabbit hole of her own memories. The light blue sticky note on her desk seemed to frown at her. She had missed her second daily dose of her medication. Again. The morning dose was easy. The afternoon one? Forget it. Or, well, Chiara always did.

Aoife didn’t blink as Chiara reached into the small dispenser by the post-it and dry swallowed the pill. For exactly the fifth time this week, Chiara had the distinct thought that she should stop doing that. It was Friday, after all.

“It’s been five years. Maybe it’s time to let go of some things?” Chiara smiled at her friend’s perceptiveness and tact in sidestepping the medication issue. However, Aoife’s predilection for dredging up the past wasn’t a preferred avenue to go down. At least not now.

“Maybe. And perhaps some things are never meant to be let go off?” She took a step back and gave the cat loaf on the windowsill a gentle ear scratch. Binoche pretended not to notice the caress and then pretended even harder not to enjoy it. Both Chiara and the cat acted as though the chocolate ball of fluff wasn’t purring.

“And speaking of letting go of things. In all these years, from Paris, to your year-long hiatus in Milan, and to our relocation to Manhattan, I still don’t understand why you took the cat.”

Chiara was about to answer when a set of heels clicked on the dark oaken floors of the atelier and Renate stepped into the light.

“As if the cat is somehow at fault for the fact that a Courtenay ended up being a Courtenay, despite all the signs pointing at her bucking that family trend. But then I told you so from the beginning. I even hired Zizou to keep watch… Too bad he couldn’t also look out for some of your softer hearts…”

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