Four Hundred and Forty Steps to the Sea by Sara Alexander

Author:Sara Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2018-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

The next afternoon ebbed toward early evening when the bell clanged and the parcel named Elizabeth was returned. I hadn’t let myself acknowledge how much I missed her till I breathed in the oat scent of her hair. The young woman who delivered her looked wan. “She was up in the night calling for you. Broke my heart. Then my eardrums. Got a temper for something so small too!”

I scooped Elizabeth up into my arms. “You wreaking havoc up on the hill?”

Her eyes lit up with the sharp blue of her father’s. His face blew into my mind.

“Grazie,” I began, turning back to the woman, “her father is indebted to you. Please, take this.”

I handed her the envelope the major had set aside, filled with notes as an extra thank-you. Only after my third insistence did she accept it and leave.

I placed Elizabeth down, and she slipped her hand into mine. I laid her small suitcase by the top of the steps that led down into the garden. We tackled each one with unhurried feet. We reached the ground; she squatted down onto the grass and picked up a stick to trace the blades. The sun was a spotlight on the golden glint in her red hair.

“Cucino la pasta, Santina!” she exclaimed with a giggle. I couldn’t remember her stringing a full sentence together in Neapolitan before. Her laughter was infectious.

“Welcome home, fanciulla!” the major called down from the upper terrace.

Elizabeth looked up. Her face widened into a grin. She waved both her hands into the air. “Papà!”

She ran away from me and toward the stairs.

“She left a Brit and returned a local, Santina,” he called down to me. “How did you manage that?”

His smile reached me like a flying ember. His skin was bronze in this light, as he faced out toward the sea, the sun on its final dip toward the horizon. He held my gaze. How were we supposed to navigate these straits? We were still threading through the story we wove. But even in this reassuring light, the ease toward the dusk, the pleasant shift from the scorch, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it would all fray before I was ready, like parchment on the breeze. All that was left of what happened between us would be an unfinished paragraph, a scrambled ending. I wasn’t ready for that ache.

We slipped back into a semblance of normality that first night. I fed Elizabeth and laid her to sleep. I could have curled up next to her then and there, tiredness lapping over me. I resisted, prepared the major a light dinner, and laid it on the terrace beyond the kitchen. The evening was balmy, one you could steep in for hours. He stepped into the kitchen and closed the door behind him.

“I don’t know where we go from here either, Santina.”

“Nowhere at all, I think,” I replied, noticing the words tripped out stickier than I had intended, hot licorice.

His expression clouded. “I have a strong instinct that you deserve a little space.

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