“I miss Morris so much.” Grace’s husky confession welled up from a grief so deep, plumb lines couldn’t scrape the bottom.
The sound of this heartbreak scared me. It was bad enough missing Dom, bad enough having every little conversation and every little black-jacket sighting remind me of him—and this was after dating him for only six weeks. So how do you even move on after an entire lifetime together? Grace’s face crumpled. Who’d ever want to risk being buried alive under that kind of grief? Not me.
“He was my life,” Grace continued softly. “I’m almost seventy. And Henry’s even older than Morris was. So why bother? If I want companionship, I could get a dog.”
“Grace Hiyashi!” cried Stesha, placing her hands on Grace’s shoulders. “I refound the love of my life and I’m almost exactly your age. There’s no age limit to loving. And have you even considered that maybe there was a reason why you met Henry where you did? You’ve always wanted to go to Bhutan.”
Unable to breathe, I needed out of this gloomy cathedral with its burden of gold. I was only too glad when Stesha glanced at her watch and said enthusiastically, “Oh, good! We’ve got just enough time to look at some ruins today.”
And here I thought we had already looked at ruins.
All I wanted to do was follow Stesha along with everyone else out into the plaza. But a promise was a promise, and I had promised Ginny I’d deliver her note. How could I place her prayer on the altar with Grace still standing there, practically guarding Saint Anthony? Finally, Grace lifted her head. Finally, she walked away with heavy footsteps. As soon as she did, I tossed Ginny’s prayer onto the pile ringing the saint’s feet. Just as I turned to escape, a name flew into my head before I could grab hold of it and bury it so far down that even my subconscious couldn’t tap it: Quattro.
What the heck?
A single candle in the alcove flickered, a sudden bend in the flame, as though Saint Anthony himself had chuckled.
Wait a second. I whirled around to face the statue. That was so not a prayer.
After Reb came home from a trip to Hawaii, she talked about certain places being able to rearrange you. I hadn’t understood until now. My survival instincts shifted into such high gear, I felt the power burst of cortisol pulsing to my nerve endings. I rushed out: out of my memories, out of the cathedral, out into the afternoon sun, where everyone was waiting. Unused to the bright equatorial light, I squinted and saw a blur of orange. Orange, the all-too-familiar color used to flag emergencies. Orange, the signature color of a certain boy with a beak for a nose and a taste for bacon maple bars and who had told me he’d be at Machu Picchu, too.
Chapter Seven
My heart couldn’t have thudded harder after an hour of wind sprints up stadium stairs. Alarmed, I scanned the crowds of tourists in the plaza for another sighting of that impossible-to-miss orange, but saw nothing except blue jeans and earth-colored trekking clothes. Relief collided with disappointment. Disappointment? What was with that? Pushing that unwanted feeling aside, I plowed toward my tour group. What was I thinking—that I’d run into Quattro just because he said he was coming to Machu Picchu? From the moment we landed, my eyes had felt desert dry, and my muscles still felt sluggish after our halfhearted run. So obviously the hallucination was just another game the high altitude was playing on my body.
“There you are!” cried Stesha when I reached the safety of our group. Before I could breathe a sigh of relief, the sea of tourists parted. And there he was, Quattro in all his blazing orange glory, staring at me, stunned. Alongside his father, he now approached, loose limbed in well-worn hiking boots.
Five feet away, Quattro’s lips curved into a confident smile I remembered too well, and he said, “Fancy meeting you here.”
My vocabulary was suddenly, unmistakably, and embarrassingly reduced to caveman grunts: “What…? How…? Why…?” Worse, the more I stammered, the more amused Quattro grew, as if he were used to girls losing command over speech in his presence.
Pull yourself together, Shana Wilde.
You are the Wilde Child.
Remember?
But all I could remember was Saint Anthony, and I shot a swift wordless glare over my shoulder in his general direction. A staff position at the National Geographic, an internship during Milan’s fashion week, an A in Chem—those were the sorts of practical miracles I could have used. Not this.