Page 8 of Valentino

I’m about to hang up. My thumb is already moving toward the red circle on the screen when the café door opens.

The small brass bell above it gives a bright, stupid little ring.

Everything in me stops.

A woman walks in.

Tall. Long-legged. Model-thin. Platinum blonde hair falls in loose waves past her shoulders. Blue-green eyes. Clear, bright skin. She moves toward the counter with the kind of ease that pretends not to know it turns heads.

But it does.

Everyone looks.

She doesn’t seem to notice. Or she’s learned not to seem to.

I know that face.

It isn’t possible.

But I know that face.

"Conti." Luca’s voice sounds far away now. "You still there?"

I don’t answer.

My hand has gone still around the phone. So has the rest of me. Not the controlled kind of stillness I use across a table from men who lie for a living. This is different. This is my body recognizing something before my mind can make sense of it.

A beat too long.

Then another.

"Conti."

"I’ll call you back," I say, and end it.

I set the phone face-down on the table, and I look at her.

Amanda White.

Vittoria’s friend. The American. The bright, loud one they keep far away from anything that bleeds.

She lives in Chicago.

That is the first fact my mind reaches for, as if facts have ever stopped the impossible.

She lives in Chicago.

But it’s her. There’s no mistaking it.

She’s wearing an expensive, close-cut camel-colored coat. A scarf in some deep wine red. Heels. She looks like she stepped out of one of the glossy advertisements pasted across the building behind her.

She looks like she belongs in this city the way I never will.

Why is she here?

Amanda

"You’re spiraling," Vittoria says in my ear. Her voice comes through tiny, the way it always does when she has me on speaker while she does six other things. "I can hear you spiraling from an ocean away, babe."