She honestly didn’t know which part of the equation made her feel more ill. Ethan. Lorraine. Or her own unforgivable blindness.
“I think the worst thing you can do right now is run off by yourself somewhere,” her mother had said much later that terrible day, when Maya seized on the Italy thing like the lifeline it was. Mother had reverted to her usual crisp, icy demeanor, as if nothing untoward had happened—or nothing she couldn’t arrange to her satisfaction, eventually. “What you need to do is come home. You can stay with your father and me until we figure out how best to handle this.”
Maya had still been wearing her wedding hair, because nothing short of a tornado could make the elaborate coiffure move. She’d changed into jeans and a T-shirt long before so she could wear something other than her fancy wedding lingerie while she canceled everything. And do things like talk to the guests who had come so far to see a wedding that would never happen.
She had been humiliated. Furious. So much of both that she couldn’t see a path through it. She couldn’t imagine how she ever wouldn’t tremble with all that rage and horror.
But what she hadn’t been, she’d realized with a sick sort of lurch deep inside as the day edged into evening on that late November day she already wanted to forget, was as heartbroken as she surely should have been.
Maybe that was why it was a little too easy for her to slip into her usual mode as one of her firm’s rising stars.
As an attorney she was decisive. Correct. And never ever emotional.
Exactly the Martin daughter her parents expected her to be.
“I’m not going to move out of my condo or slink off back home to my parents,” she said, the decision coming to her in a flash. A flash that she knew would irritate Ethan, which made it even better. She was standing in the corner of the hotel suite—the honeymoon suite, of course, just to salt the wound—staring out at Toronto there at her feet. Like it was mocking her. “If Ethan wants to run off with Lorraine, he’s welcome to do so. That will involve him moving out, not me. And I would rather he do that when I’m not around.”
“If that’s what you want,” her mother said in an overly patient way, as if Maya was acting irrationally. It set Maya’s teeth on edge, but she’d already done more yelling today than she had in years. Maybe ever. She wasn’t going to give in to the urge for more when all it did was make her throat hurt. “But I don’t see what good it will do you to run off to a foreign country—”
“We booked a month’s holiday on the Amalfi coast,” Maya said, with the bedrock certainty deep inside her that she thought might be entirely made of fury and rage. “It will be the first vacation I’ve taken since law school. Yes, it was supposed to be our honeymoon. But I’m not giving it up just because Ethan turned out to be an asshole.”
No one had supported this decision. Melinda had argued against it. She’d recruited her engineer husband to do the same. Her parents had been deeply opposed, nearly frigid in their distaste for Maya’s plan. Everyone had argued at her, yet had shied away from addressing the elephant in the room—which was that clearly her decision-making was faulty.
Maya had stuck to her guns, faulty or not. She needed to go away. She needed to put as much distance between this debacle and whatever was on the other side of it. She needed to figure out a new path, a new plan, and she couldn’t do that here in the wreckage of the old.
She had flatly refused to see Lorraine. She had declined the opportunity to speak to Ethan further when he’d reappeared outside the hotel suite. She’d had her father inform him that she would be using both the plane tickets they’d booked and the hotel—a charming boutique hotel in the exclusive St. George portfolio—and he could take the opportunity of her absence to remove himself and all evidence of his existence from their condo.
Papa had reported back that Ethan hadn’t taken the news well, just as Maya had hoped.
And Papa had allowed himself a slight smile while he’d shared that with the family, which was as close to violence as Maya’s stern, dignified father had ever gotten to her knowledge.
The great thing about her decision to leave Toronto, she reflected the following evening when she was at cruising altitude over the Atlantic Ocean with an empty seat next to her, was that no one was there to stare at her and ask her how she felt. About anything. She was just another woman on a plane, blessedly anonymous and with no reason to die of her own embarrassment.
She landed in Frankfurt on Monday morning, then transferred to another flight down into Naples in Italy. By the time her taxi delivered her to the cliffside town on the Amalfi coast where she’d be spending the next month suspended over the glorious Tyrrhenian Sea, she was dead on her feet.
She hardly noticed her surroundings. She had the faintest notion of crisp, white walls and a pink-and-blue sunset beyond the lobby, but it took all her energy to focus on the chic, smiling woman behind the front desk.
“You are booked into the honeymoon suite, signora,” the woman said in charmingly accented English. “Yet you appear to be traveling alone...?”
Maya stared back at her. She had been traveling for close to twenty-four hours, all told. She had suffered the greatest humiliation of her life and she wasn’t sure she’d even scratched the surface of processing that. She had lost her closest friend and her fiancé in one fell swoop, and the real tragedy was that they hadn’t died in a freak accident. She couldn’t mourn them when they’d betrayed her.
They were both quite alive, apparently perfectly happy, and had each other to lean on.
It was Maya who had to deal with the mess they’d made, alone.
All that and the Venetian mirrors behind the front desk reminded her that she had left her hair in its wedding style, tamed into an elegant chignon that twenty-four hours of airplanes and airports hadn’t so much as dented.
She moved her glare from that hair—a walking monument to her humiliation that she was going to have to deal with as soon as possible—to the poor woman standing at the desk, waiting patiently for her answer.
“It will just be me,” she said.
And offered no further explanation.
After a beat, the woman nodded. “Of course, signora.”
Maya followed the porter up several sets of stairs that felt like an assault on her already overexhausted system, then down a graceful, soothing hallway. He threw open the doors at the far end, then ushered her into a set of airy, sweeping rooms, bright white with blue accents, and sunset views at every turn.
She saw the sea before her and the darkening sky above. It was beyond pretty, but she couldn’t really take it in. When the doors finally closed behind her, she threw herself across the four-poster king bed in the bedroom, fully clothed, and slept like the dead.
And when she woke up the next morning, she was in Italy, a world away from Toronto.
That was the good news.
The bad news was that she hadn’t imagined the debacle of her wedding day. There was no ring on her finger any longer, and she frowned down at the place it had been and the dent that was still in her skin. She took herself off to the washroom, scowled at herself in the mirror and applied herself to a long, restorative shower and then returning her hair to its natural state. When it was finally the cloud of black curls around her face that she preferred, springy and free and big, she padded back out to the main room. Then, at last, she pushed her way through the French doors onto the balcony that ran the length of her suite.
And only then, overlooking the stunning, impossible stretch of blue before her that was the Gulf of Salerno rolling into the Tyrrhenian Sea and on to forever on this crisp late November morning, did she take a real, deep breath.
Then another. And another, until she started to feel, if not herself, something other than the prickly ball of horror and humiliation she’d been since Saturday.
Ethan