Small Miracles by Anne Booth

Author:Anne Booth [Booth, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473593961
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2022-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

Francesco watched his wife Maria clear the table after breakfast. He thought she was even more beautiful at fifty than when they had first met thirty years before, and he had never met a more beautiful twenty-year-old. Unselfconsciously, she pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, and he was filled with desire.

They shouldn’t still be here in Cardellino. They should have been travelling by now, drinking wine, rising at dawn to watch the sunrise and going for long, moonlit beach walks, holding hands by the sea somewhere. It had been their promise to each other all those years ago when they had first agreed to come back to help. They would help run the hotel in the summer, and then they would travel.

‘If we can travel every winter, I can cope,’ Maria had said, twenty years before. She had gone for a long walk on her own to think it over when the idea of returning to Italy had first arisen, and she had come back to their flat in Paris prepared to give up her satisfying job and go back to Cardellino with him. When she decided something, she stuck to it. Even back then he had known she was truthful to a fault, but he had still wanted to check. He knew that she had given up so much when they realised they would never be able to have children. They had already changed their lives completely, and were happy, with good careers, good friends. To ask her to give it all up a second time seemed too much.

‘Are you sure? It was never in our plans to run my grandmother’s hotel,’ Francesco had said.

‘Let’s change our plans then!’ said Maria, laughing. She had looked into his eyes and hugged him. ‘We’ve had to change much bigger plans before, and look, my love, after everything, it has worked out well. Let’s have another adventure! That’s what we are good at, you and me!’

And so they had come back to Cardellino, and for the next fifteen years, through all the springs and summers, they had run the hotel as Francesco’s grandmother and great-uncle grew too old to do so. They worked so well as a team, and together made it a place of hospitality and fun and love. They made sure that everyone around their table felt welcome, and few noticed how skilled their hosts were, how hard they had worked to make strangers feel like friends, to keep the chat effortlessly lively whilst steering the table away from argument. The hotel was filled with laughter. Guests went to bed happy, even when they had unknowingly exhausted their hosts, and people booked year after year, counting down the months before they could see Maria’s beautiful smile again, tell them both their news, get wise advice, laugh as Francesco told jokes and replenished their glasses with wine and served them wonderful meals. The children they had wanted might not have arrived, but they knew that everyone they met felt part of their family, and they had been happy.

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