She’d burst into tears. My Mirabella. The brave one who never cried, except at weddings, as she told me, once again, when I passed her the tissues. And only then it was because it was not her own.
You can throw all the arrows fate can conjure up at Mirabella and she stands tall and strong and figures the way out, saves you from the certain hell that awaits if she doesn’t. Now, that’s a person you call a friend.
I’m sitting here, on the terrace of the Villa Romantica, where I never expected to be again, reluctantly tasting Mirabella’s latest concoction. A vermouth-cassis she calls it. It’s sort of reddish and clinking with ice cubes and tastes I think vaguely of paint remover, but I’m polite and I say thank you and sip obediently. I think maybe she got the proportions wrong, or used the wrong liquor. Ah well, she can’t be good at everything. I think I shall tell her in the future to stick with champagne.
I’m not sure I’ll ever get over the bizarre events that took place in the Villa Mara. Chad tells me it will leave an emotional scar, and Chad should know because he’s a doctor. He’s dealt with kids who have lost half their faces; he’s put them back together as best he could, and he tells me that after a while they smile again, they talk and laugh and behave just like regular kids. Trauma is internal as well as external. Just look at Mirabella’s hands, which finally, she has left bare. No more gloves. No more hiding the scars. But that is her story to tell, not mine.
Mine is very simple. I came here, to the villa, running away from a ruin of a life, not knowing what I wanted, believing I had lost everything that mattered, my husband, my home, my small amount of savings, my very identity. Mirabella took me in hand, she picked me up from the lowly place I had fallen, she saved my life in the car crash, she saved me again and again, ultimately from the Boss. An evil man.
I ask over and over how I could have imagined I was falling in love with him. I remind myself he was good looking, in that dashing, big man, important person, richer-than-thou way. I remembered the thrill of being on the Boss’s arm, a woman to be reckoned with. Nobody would dismiss you or turn you away. Now, coming out at the other end of the story, with the truth known to the world, the Boss’s reputation gone, his entire secret life exposed, my own story a media scandal that I’m lucky to have survived. I am thankful there are no more TV journalists with cameras, no more celebrity hunters thrusting cell phones in my face. I am anonymous again, and that is exactly how I want it.
Actually, that’s not quite true. I’m sitting here, on the Villa Romantica terrace sipping Mirabella’s awful concoction, waiting for “exactly” how I want it. Or rather “who” I want. I need to see him striding toward me, his cap, as always, clutched in his hand, his uniform immaculate, the gold stars shining on his epaulettes, his eyes alight with that special gleam that means “love.” Anyone who has seen it knows exactly what I mean. It can light even an ordinary face, and in a man it’s irresistible.
I am wearing a simple white cotton skirt that flares out from a narrow waist, tied with a black ribbon, fastened with a neat bow. I never thought I was a “bow” kind of girl but Mirabella informed me that I was. It was she who helped me choose this outfit on a recent shopping trip to Cannes, necessary because I’ve lost so much weight and am too skinny for my old clothes.
But I’m young, I’m healthy again, and I am much stronger than I ever was. That frightened girl running from “the cheater,” and the bad marriage, is no more. Soon I shall move in with my handsome Colonel. We shall marry as soon as I am free, and I shall become stepmother to two delightful girls who are as needy for a mom as I am to be one.
If anyone needed a happy ending, it was me. (Or do I mean “I”?)
56
Chad Prescott