The One In My Heart

But as soon as I said those words, I began to wonder. I’d always viewed our first time together as somewhat inevitable, from the moment I rather unsubtly invited myself to his house for tiramisu.

Had I been looking at a limited picture? What if everything he had done—tossing me the key to his car, walking away, promptly saying good-bye in front of his house—had all been calculated to put me at ease and gain my trust?

“You wouldn’t have fallen for anything like that,” he said.

“I wouldn’t?” I murmured. “How would you have picked me up?”

He dropped the bag of groceries into his scuffed messenger bag and stuck his hands into the pockets of his trench coat. We walked for a minute in silence, me wondering whether my question had gone unheard, before he glanced at me.

Our gaze met. Electricity crackled along the surface of my skin. He looked away. Another minute passed before he looked at me again. This time I kept my eyes on my feet, not wanting to be so affected, but feeling the jolt all the same, the force of his attention.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

There was no particular change to his voice, yet for some reason he came across as just perceptibly nervous.

“Evangeline.” Did I sound similarly on edge?

“Do you come here often?”

I looked at the ornate wrought-iron gate we were passing, and the red-roofed villa inside—and imagined us instead at a crowded nightspot, with throbbing music, pulsing lights, and the odor of too many bodies pressed close together. “No, hardly ever.”

“Why not?”

“Not my scene.”

“Do you want to get out of here? Have a drink somewhere?”

“Why?” I countered. “Because a nice girl like me shouldn’t be alone?”

“A nice girl like you should be alone as long and as often as you prefer,” he said quietly. “But I want to be there for when you’d like someone next to you.”

Pain pinched my heart, the pain of being understood when I didn’t wish to be, by someone who was only playing a game.

“That’s not bad.” I put on my shades. “Look, we can see the sea again.”


THE WALLS AND ARCHES OF Villa Jovis that still stood were massive. Despite two millennia of harsh maritime weathering, the mastery of their construction remained evident in the precision of the masonry and the levelness of the brickwork. And Tiberius sure knew how to pick a spot for his pleasure palace: The ruins, surrounded by a heart-stopping panorama of sea and sky, occupied the easternmost tip of the island, twelve hundred feet above a sheer drop to the waves below.

Bennett and I sat on a small outcrop overlooking a cluster of cliff-hugging pines and made a picnic from his bag of groceries—bread, cheese, olives, and a tiny bottle of white wine. I didn’t eat much—and didn’t take more than a sip from the bottle.

I should have driven by him that night.

I should have said no to everything that followed.

And I should have backed out the moment I understood what had made me say yes to his crazy scheme.

It still wasn’t too late. People broke up all the time, didn’t they, even in the middle of “romantic” trips to beautiful places?

“Tell me about the ball—the one in Paris,” said Bennett, putting away the remnants of our lunch. “What did I miss?”

I frowned. What had he missed? I remembered very little of the ball itself—a flash of my stark red lips in a mirror, the iciness of Pater’s fingers in mine as we danced the first dance together, the conspicuous absence of Zelda, kept back in our hotel suite with the kindly French psychiatric nurse who had agreed to come on short notice.

Ingrained by years of practice, my mind immediately turned away from those memories. This was where I’d find myself back on the night of the rehearsal, at the beginning of my alternate history. At the very last moment, when our hope was spent, my most generic Prince Charming would appear as if by magic, a little out of breath and full of apologetic smiles.

But I could conjure up nothing at all. Meeting the Somerset boy in person had destroyed my alternate history: He would never have come to us, not under any circumstances or in any parallel universes.

Yet now the one who had taken the road less traveled wanted to know where the other path would have led.

“You didn’t miss much,” I said, staring at a distant sailboat. “A bunch of girls in big dresses—by and large not having the time of their lives.”

Bennett picked up a pinecone and ran his fingers along its scales. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there. My parents asked again and again if I meant it—that I’d actually go to Paris as I promised. And again and again I said yes, even as I packed up all my belongings. I was afraid that if I answered truthfully, they would swoop in and do something drastic. And I needed the master of my residence house to give me my passport so I could take the flight to San Francisco that Moira had booked.”

I shrugged. “The ball wasn’t really my thing anyway. And your replacement was a count, so my father was satisfied on that front.”

“I spoke to your father once, before my parents sent me to England.”