Right?
But as she looked up at one of the jewelry stores, a tiny place with a glass case right up front advertising diamanti, she saw his back, a back she knew just as well as his front—linen shirt, too-long graying hair, the tanned limbs of a man who’d once been an athlete . . . Her stomach dropped, and she confirmed it.
Standing not ten yards away from her was, in part, what she’d left America to escape.
Her ex-husband, Evan.
CHAPTER FOUR
Nope. Not possible.
As she stood there among the beauty that was Florence, staring as her ex-husband browsed the jewelry cases, hand-in-hand with a young, blonde nightmare, Diana was convinced she was seeing things.
She blinked. Blinked harder. Still there. Pinched herself. No change.
All of that failing, she looked around, desperate for a place to escape to. If they were here, she certainly didn’t want to be, too.
Too late. At that moment, her ex turned around and caught sight of her. The blissful smile painted on his dopey, in-love face morphed to delighted surprise. Diana’s cheeks flamed hot as he waved at her.
She groaned under her breath, “Here we go,” and plastered her own stupid smile on her face as she walked over. She said, too loudly and far more joyously than she felt, “Fancy meeting you here.”
He leaned in for a kiss as his fiancée turned around, her long locks nearly whipping in Diana’s face. Diana stiffly completed the cordial act, her skin crawling the whole time. As she moved back, she noticed dark marking, the promise of an inked heart, hiding underneath his partly opened shirt, right near the collarbone.
He’d gotten a tattoo? Probably emblazoned with his intended’s name. What happened to his assertion that the body was a temple, and that ink of any sort was like graffiti, dirty and defiling?
She didn’t need to look far for the answer. Tilda had quite a few tattoos of her own—some Chinese symbol on her wrist, a smattering of roses on a vine snaking up her ankle. Probably a tramp stamp on her back.
Tilda was, after all, about half his age, and had gone to school with Bea, her youngest. The two hadn’t been friends since middle school, when Bea got serious about her studies and Tilda got serious about . . . other things. Bea had nicknamed her Vidal Sassoon, because all of her brains were in her hair. The name fit. The woman had some serious hair, piled atop her head like a macaron tower and spilling over her shoulders. The last time Diana had been this close to Tilda, she’d been doling out cupcakes in the backyard for Bea’s eighth birthday. Little had she known that that cute, pigtailed blonde would transform into this.
Tilda let out a long giggle that sounded like a cross between a seagull screeching and a car alarm going off. Her jaw dropped wide. “Mrs. St. James! I didn’t know you’d be here!” she exclaimed, leaning in and giving her the double-cheek kiss. She smelled like bubblegum, and indeed, that was because she was chewing and popping some. She giggled some more. “Oh. I guess I’m going to be the future Mrs. St. James! Isn’t that funny?”
Hilarious. Diana smiled as Tilda extended her fragile hand to reveal a diamond that looked even more expensive than it had the first time Diana had seen it, on Instagram. Expensive and . . . gaudy. Not her style at all.
But, clearly, Vidal’s. One only needed to look at her to know that. She was wearing a sunshine-yellow dress that bared far too much skin. It was almost indecent, the way the two yellow triangles up top fought unsuccessfully to keep the young woman’s huge breasts covered. They were spilling out over the top and sides, shouting, Here we are! Diana didn’t have to look around to know that people were staring at her, at them. It was impossible not to.
“Oh, very,” she said, unable to stop talking to the girl with a condescending air. She lowered her voice as she fixed her gaze on Evan. Evan, who in addition to getting newly inked, had lost weight, gotten a tan, and was sporting a new, spiky hairstyle that did nothing to hide his receding hairline. He was trying too hard to fit in with his new company, definitely, but even though he looked silly, Diana felt like the silly one. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
He laughed and wrapped an arm around his young bride-to-be, beaming down at her. “Well . . . funniest thing. I was telling Tilly here all about the trip you had planned, and she said she’s never been to Europe and always wanted to go, ever since she was a little girl.”
So, like, five years ago. Something about it sounded fishy. “Is that right? Because I know you were just in Haiti a few—”
“Yes! I know. But I checked with work, had to do a little organizing so I could find a couple of free days I could take, and here we are.”
Diana just stared, trying to keep her heart rate from rising. How many times when they were married had she begged him to take her to Europe? How many times had he said “maybe next year” because he simply couldn’t get away from his all-important job? They barely went anywhere during their marriage. She’d planted brochures around the house, told him every birthday it was at the top of her list, and every time she watched a movie set in Europe, she’d sigh and tell him it was her dream. And he’d always found a way to get out of it.
But it turned out, it really didn’t take very much to convince him.
Just an empty head with two massive balloons and a lot of hair attached to it, who was now nibbling on his ear.
“Oh. How nice.” Her voice was wooden. She couldn’t help it.
Not that Evan noticed. At this point, the poor fool was so taken by the Vidal delusion that he wouldn’t notice if a cruise ship swam upriver and knocked them all into the Arno. Vidal whispered something in his ear, and his goofy grin widened. He dropped his hand behind her, around her slim waist. “So where are you staying, love?”
Diana pressed her lips together, not sure if she could take any more. Knowing Evan, he’d suggest getting together for lunch, which would be the equivalent, fun-wise, of eating lunch with a bunch of angry hornets. This was where Diana would grab her phone, check the display, and rush off, saying she was too busy to talk.
Only when she pulled it out did she remember that it didn’t really have much of display. She flipped it open but in the sun glare, couldn’t see the screen. She cupped a hand around it and checked the time. “Uh . . . I’ve got to—”
“Oh my gosh! Is that an actual flip phone?” Tilda exclaimed, erupting with that horrible laugh again. “I haven’t seen one of those in years.”
“Yes, I lost my phone and all the iPhones are on back—”
“My mom had one when I was a baby! She used to let me play with it.”
“Yes, it’s almost an antique, hmm,” Diana said, unamused. “I do have to go. I just got here today and I have to—”
“Aw, so soon?” Evan said, his brow crinkling. “Are you sure? I mean, it’s so great that we just ran into you like this. What are the chances, huh?”
Really, the chances were not great, come to think of it. Sometimes she could walk circles around the supermarket in NYC, a place of fewer than five hundred square feet, and never find a single bottle of ketchup. The fact that in this whole wide world, she and her ex were together, in this spot, now? It was almost too great to be a coincidence.