Chapter Forty-Nine Rory

Le Sirenuse has a siren-red exterior that opens into a quaint but luxe old Italian foyer—tan tiles punctured by turquoise and navy ones; a reception desk made of old weathered wood behind which room keys hang on pegs, harking back to another time.

Ginevra marches toward the elevator, the fastest I’ve ever seen the author move. I rush after her and slice out my hand as the door begins to close.

I slip inside. Ginevra’s gaze hardly flickers at me. She presses the top button.

“Want to venture a guess where I’ve booked my precious sister in?”

Her voice is dull, almost robotic—so different from the Ginevra I’ve come to know, the Ginevra with warmth, if a little odd.

“A suite, I’m assuming? Ginevra, I really think we should… I don’t think now, when you’re angry—and of course you would be, I’m not trying to minimize what you must be feeling, because I’m incredibly angry, too—but I don’t think now, exactly, is the right time to meet Orsola. I mean, shouldn’t we cool down, both of us, before seeing her?”

“No. I don’t think. And, yes, you’re right about the suite. The premier suite in this place. A two-bedroom apartment—because one-bedroom would be too tight for my sister’s lavish tastes. A terrace facing the sea, overlooking the manicured gardens. Want to guess at how much a place like that costs? Costs me, I mean.”

“A lot?”

Ginevra laughs a scary, crackly laugh. “Five thousand euros a night. So, yes. A lot.”

The elevator dings, and off she goes, her short sturdy frame striding purposefully down the bright white hallway with its cross-vault ceilings and cheery tiles with navy swirls.

“Ginevra, I don’t—”

But she’s already knocking—hard, insistent raps—and by the time I reach Ginevra, the door has opened, revealing a striking woman whose plasticky face looks supremely irritated.

“Stai scherzando?” I see her spot me, light spark in her eyes. She switches to English, still with an air of being imposed upon. “I was coming. You didn’t need to make my eardrums bleed, Ginevra.”

It takes a moment for it to set in who this woman—Orsola—reminds me of. At last I come to it: Donatella Versace. It’s the same long platinum blond hair, the fake orangey tan. A face-lift, no doubt. Orsola is short like Ginevra, but that’s about where the similarity ends. Where the author is hefty, all clad in black, her sister is tiny, with arms as flimsy as spaghetti. She is wearing an outfit wholly at odds with her age and the laid-back, old-money surroundings of this charming hotel. Instead, from her moss-green flared, vaguely see-through pants to the matching crop top spilling out cleavage, she screams new money.

More accurately, new money, courtesy of her sister.

My heart is pounding as I approach her—this woman my father has warned me my entire life is evil, who so callously and knowingly set out to ruin his life and her own sister’s. Who stole my brother from his mother.

Would Max have acted differently toward the end if he’d had a mother to care for him?

Orsola leans toward her sister to cheek kiss, but Ginevra flinches. She steps back. Orsola looks momentarily stymied, but then straightens.

Ginevra motions to me. “This is—”

“Rory Aronov,” Orsola supplies. She doesn’t even hide it—pursing her pumped-up lips and giving her eyes free rein to rove over me, head to toe. “Yes, you’re Rory. Of course. Ansel’s Rory.” Her eyes widen with obvious false cheer. “It’s so wonderful to meet you, darling.”

She kisses me, once on each cheek, and I am too dumbfounded to protest. Instead, I am engulfed in her thick floral perfume, but also her natural, pungent, almost mildewy scent that has inexplicably survived the dousing.

“Where is the boy?” Orsola asks. “Max,” she adds, as an afterthought.

Ginevra doesn’t answer. I can imagine it’s all she can do to follow this horrible, manipulative person into the suite she has paid for.

Even putting aside all I now know, it’s clear enough from briefly meeting Orsola—there is no way, not ever in a million years, that this woman would have captivated my father. Papa is too smart, too perceptive. Too loving, too full of integrity. He would have seen right through her.

It was Ginevra who was weak… understandably under her sister’s spell… traumatized at a young age… impressionable.

My mind swishes with all the incomprehensible things. We shouldn’t be here. It’s too soon. Too raw. After all Orsola did, all we’ve finally understood…

Something surges in me—I fucking hate this woman.

And if I feel that, then what is cycling through Ginevra’s mind now?

The author and her sister trade ostensible pleasantries. They’ve switched to Italian, so I can’t understand what they’re saying.

“Rory.” Ginevra glances at me. “My sister and I are going to go out on the terrace. We have a few things to catch up on, before…” She indicates pastries and coffee and fruity alcoholic drinks arranged artfully on a table. “Then we will have coffee and treats. Lemon granitas, too. Delicious. We’ll all have a fine gab.”

She’s clearly speaking facetiously, with an aggressive calm that I find terrifying. Orsola doesn’t seem to notice. She’s used to, it seems, focusing most of her attention upon herself.

I sink down into a couch slipcovered in pale blue damask. I take in the room, almost impossibly sunny and pleasing, at odds with Orsola, the ugly, evil woman who has now been fully unmasked.

I’m staring at the terrace, at the white cast-iron chairs and table and the endless wash of blue that suffuses the horizon. The painted church dome we could see from our villa, too, but closer now.

The voices on the terrace ratchet up in volume, angry Italian. Vicious Italian, even.

My eyes flicker, focus—and that’s when I see something tumble over the thin white lattice rail of the balcony. Not just something: a body.

Followed by a scream, and then a loud crack.

Minutes later, I am standing beside Ginevra in the property’s lush gardens. Orsola’s crumpled shape lies at our feet in a tangle of juniper bushes, her shimmery green outfit camouflaged by the foliage. It’s evident she’s dead, simply by her body’s unnatural twist. But I knew it even as we rushed down; no one could survive a fall that high.

Sirens begin their din in the distance.

“What did I do? What did I do?” Ginevra’s shaking, her eyes darting around. But it’s only us for now, though I hear voices in the distance. I called an ambulance, of course, after it happened. And the staff on the property will no doubt be descending soon.

“How could I do it, Rory? What did I just do?”

“What did your sister say?” I ask. “What—”

“Orsola admitted to everything. She was almost… smug—yes, that’s the word.” Ginevra stares numbly at her sister’s body. “She was running her charade the whole time. Our whole life. She had me eating out of her hand ever since I was a kid. Like a dog. Obedient. Not questioning anything. She even told me—she even said that she wrote to Ansel eventually after the whole ordeal, pretending to be me.”

“Pretending to be you? I don’t understand.”

“Yes! Telling him I didn’t love him. That he needed to stop contacting me. She was worried that eventually I’d cave, that I’d listen to Ansel’s pleas, read his letters, believe him that he loved me. So Orsola had to thwart it, prevent it at all costs.”

I shake my head, trying to make sense of what she’s saying. “But why would Papa believe it was you writing that letter? He knew how evil Orsola was, how she’d manipulated you. Forging a letter from you wouldn’t be out of fathomable bounds when he knew what she’d already done.”

“She had me sign my name on the letter! Your father knew my signature. It’s specific.”

I nod. I’ve seen her doodle it countless times, with that distinct swirl at the tail of the a.

“He knew my sister couldn’t imitate it. And yet, in those horrible months after my father died, Orsola and I had to sign countless documents. Bills, estate things. She slipped them in front of me, one by one. I was practically catatonic with grief. I didn’t pay attention to what I was signing. She wrote Ansel a letter from me to get him to give up on me, and manipulated me into signing it myself! She admitted it all. She took it, Rory!”

My breath feels all hoovered up—the horrific facts, but also, the body at our feet. “Took what?” I finally manage to ask.

“My family. The family I could have had. But I killed her!” Ginevra’s voice crackles with pain. “How could I do it? To my own sister. To my twin. How could I just push—”

“She jumped,” I tell the author quietly. “I’ll say I watched her jump.”

The sirens grow closer. Ginevra says, “I’m not her main character any longer.”