Page 251 of Modern Romance November 2024 5-8

Immediately, she leaned her face over her menu to confide, ‘I looked at bringing Sheena here for her birthday last summer but couldn’t get a reservation for love nor money.’ She’d been snootily informed the restaurant had a fourteen-month waiting list. ‘She is going to begreenwhen I tell her I’ve been.’

‘You should have told me—I could have got the two of you in.’

‘Don’tevertell Sheena that.’ Not that he would ever meet her. Not now. Marcello didn’t know it but this wasn’t just their last night together. This was the beginning of their end, something she was resolutely not allowing herself to think about. He’d gone to so much effort that it would be cruel to ruin the evening by letting her emotions get the better of her. There would be plenty of time for that when she broke the news to him. Let them have this one last night and part with the best memories of each other.

He grinned. ‘How do you know Sheena? Did you meet at Columbia?’

‘No, after Columbia. We lived together for a while. I was looking for a new place to live and she was looking for a new roommate. Mutual friends facilitated it and introduced us. They were convinced that as we’re both Irish we were bound to know each other because obviously everyone from Ireland knows each other.’

His grin widened. ‘I used to get that when I first moved here. Anyone with a first-generation Italian friend was certain we must have spent our childhoods together.’

‘Do you know what the best bit is?’

His eyes gleamed. ‘Tell me.’

‘It turned out that Sheena and Ididkind of know each other. Our mothers used to work for the same accountancy firm!’

Oh, how she loved Marcello’s laughter at this, loved how when their drinks arrived he held his aloft so she could clink hers to it, loved how he urged her to try his and loved even more his laughter when she pulled a disgusted face—who putolive juicein a vodka, for heaven’s sake?—at its offensive taste.

‘Your tastebuds are warped,’ she informed him.

‘So you don’t want to share the seafood platter, then?’ he teased.

It was after they’d finished their first course, were on their third round of drinks and helping themselves to the enormous tray heaped with clams, oysters, tuna crudo, jumbo shrimps and lobster that had been delivered to their table, that he said, ‘Do you know, I have never asked what brought you to America?’

She looked up at him, startled by the observation. ‘Haven’t you?’

He shook his head. ‘I just assumed you had followed the American dream like most other people who emigrate here.’

The look that passed between them conveyed perfectly well that it didn’t need to be said that Marcello had turned his back on a nightmare rather than follow a dream.

‘I did have that dream,’ she admitted, squeezing lemon juice over the seafood she’d piled onto her plate. ‘But it wasn’t the dream of making a pot of money. It was the freedom New York promised that drew me.’

‘What kind of freedom were you seeking?’

‘All kinds. I’m from a small town with a small high street where all the shops close at five and the only night life are pubs where the only activities are games of darts and table skittles, and the music comes from twenty-year-old jukeboxes. New York seemed to promise everything I thought I was missing out on. The city that never sleeps? I wanted that, thank you very much.’

Marcello laughed and plucked a fat chip from the metal basket piled with them. ‘That aspect drew me too. Did you not consider moving to an Irish city or to England?’

‘All my favourite films were set in New York so for me it was a no-brainer. I couldn’t believe it when I was accepted into Columbia. I only chose business on a whim because I couldn’t think of anything else.’

‘You were eighteen?’

‘I’d just turned nineteen.’

He thought of himself at nineteen. He’d gone to university in Bologna, a four-hour drive from his family home in Rome. His parents had visited every other weekend armed with cases of freshly laundered clothes, which they’d swapped for the mounds of dirty clothes he’d piled all over his cramped room.

Where he’d been happily spoilt and cosseted by adoring parents, Victoria had fought to be seen by hers. Moving to New York meant Victoria had been on her own. In the eighteen months she’d worked for him, not a single member of her family had flown out to visit her.

‘That must have been daunting.’

‘It wasterrifying,’ she agreed gleefully.

‘And your family? What did they think of you leaving? Were they proud?’ He hoped as hard as he’d ever hoped for anything that they were.

‘They were delighted for me. I became the golden Cusack they could all brag about to their friends and casually drop into conversation about my life in The Big Apple.’ The gleefulness in her voice faded. ‘It took me leaving to make them actually remember my name.’

That was one thing he would never understand. He supposed in big families like the Cusacks, it was all too easy for one of them to feel lost within it. Marcello’s extended family was big, but when he was growing up, his immediate family had been just the four of them, their parents spoiling and cosseting Benito as much as they’d done him.

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