Chapter 23

Margot lost track of how long she wandered the streets of Naples or how many self-pitying scoops of gelato she ate along the way. Crowds ebbed and flowed around her in a constant stream. Every time she passed a statue, she flinched, expecting it to spring to life to do Venus’s bidding, but Van had the shard, and all the statues stayed still.

The aftermath of her emotions always left a throbbing in her chest. An ache, like the dull point of a blade pressing beneath her skin. This was different. It twisted deeper.

Why hadn’t Van chased after her? That was what they did in the books. It would rain, someone would cry, but they fought for each other—not against. Not Van. Van had used her. He wasn’t just going to steal the treasure. He was going to steal her future.

Napoli Centrale wrapped around her as the sun started its descent, sending trails of diaphanous gold through the station’s glass ceiling. The queue moved quickly, and Margot purchased a one-way ticket back to Pompeii. She’d pack the last of her things, use Hotel Villa Minerva’s painfully slow Wi-Fi and her emergency credit card to buy another return flight, and board the next plane heading stateside.

She should have never come to Italy.

Why had she thought she could prove everyone wrong? If anything, she’d handed them crucial evidence in the case against her. Everything she’d tried this summer had crumbled in her hands. Midas’s touch, except instead of gold she got cold, hard stone.

Vase? Gone.

Van? Gone.

Her dignity? Gone.

Just when she thought she’d have the back of the train car to herself, a couple walked hand in hand down the aisle. They looked older than Margot, but not by much. It was almost like staring in a fun house mirror from the future—her with dark curls piled on top of her head, and him with suntanned skin and wild green eyes. They dropped into the seats across from Margot, and he immediately looped an arm around the girl’s shoulders. Her head nestled in the crook of his neck. Obviously and sickeningly in love.

Margot turned, leaning her forehead against the cool glass of the window. She was never one to shy away from a serendipitous main-character-in-a-music-video moment, but she was too upset to romanticize her life. Not even the blur of the Italian countryside past the train’s window could quiet the shouting in her skull.

Her fight with Van lingered in every corner of her mind, replaying over and over and over again. All the things she wished she hadn’t said. All the things she couldn’t believe she’d had to.

He had every intention of letting the curse turn her heart to stone. Of leaving her in the temple for good while he ran off with the treasure.

Her traitorous brain, however, seemed perfectly content to fixate on the way Van’s hands had spread against her back this afternoon, holding her close, firm and certain, as solid as rock. The way he’d steadied her when a sprawling black seemed to crawl out from the depths of her, all-consuming. He was daylight to all her shadows. He’d blinded her, and she’d let him.

God, Astrid was going to give her a hell of a lecture when she realized she’d been right about how big of a failure Margot was, about how Van had just been using her—about everything.

She didn’t even want to think about what her dad was going to say, but she didn’t have a choice. His contact info popped up on her phone. It rang only once before she answered. Better to get this over with.

The minute the line connected, he blared, “Margot Helena Rhodes, where are you?”

“Hi, Dad. How are you?” she deflected.

“Don’t hi, Dad me,” he said. “I drove all the way into Atlanta tonight, and you weren’t there. And then, you don’t answer any of my calls. You ignore all my texts. I almost filed a missing person report.”

Margot sank into her seat. “I’d have to be MIA for forty-eight hours to do that, I’m pretty sure.”

“That is not the point, Gogo.”

“You were right,” she said. Her voice crackled, fighting back a fresh surge of tears. She simply had not packed enough Kleenex for the waterworks today.

She could hear the sigh in his words. “How so?”

Margot sighed, too, and leaned her head back against the cloth headrest. “I got it out of my system, okay?” Her throat tightened around the words like she was having an allergic reaction to being just as impulsive and emotional as everyone said she was.

“If only you’d realized that eighteen hours ago,” he said. There was an underlying edge to his voice, the tinge of impatience he often took when reprimanding her.

Margot’s voice was barely a whisper. “I want to come home.”

“I know,” her dad said. No hesitation. Like it was so obvious to him that she’d buckle under the weight of being alone in another country and come crying back to him.

Because he’d picked her up off the pavement after refusing to learn how to ride a bike with the training wheels on. Because he’d held her when she accidentally sucked salt water up her nose during their first beach vacation. Because she’d always, always, jumped first, thought second.

She’d wanted him to fight. To tell her she was brave and tough and capable. That she’d made a mistake but could still fix it, could stick things out for once even though it had been hard.

He didn’t.

Margot should have let it go. Instead, she pressed harder. “What do you mean, you know?”

“You’ve always had quite the overactive imagination.” He said it the way someone would say You always have liked sardines on your pizza for some ungodly reason. “This was just another phase, but you’ll get over it. And I’m trying, Margot, but I swear, you and your mom are so alike.”

“How would you know? You barely know me at all,” Margot said, her words filed to a point. Could he tell how the pit in her stomach threatened to eat her alive? How suddenly her bones squeezed around her lungs? Did he even care?

Being like her mom wasn’t inherently a bad thing. Parker Rhodes was the kind of mom who wouldn’t just read bedtime stories—she’d act them out, costumes and all. She always volunteered for bake sales, even if she’d sometimes forget until ten p.m. and turn their galley kitchen into Iron Chef stadium overnight. Everything with her was an adventure; they’d pretend to be swashbuckling pirates in the drive-through line or fairies foraging in the grocery store, anything for a little extra magic.

And then, one day, she left. On purpose. And decidedly without Margot.

Love could be cruel and thankless. It could leave when you least expected it. It could haunt your heart like a creaking staircase, the sound of someone coming home but never actually arriving.

He clicked his tongue. “Don’t know you? That’s hardly fair. I know you went to Italy because of a book.”

“How—” Margot stuttered. When had he realized she’d salvaged it from the donation pile? “What do you know about Relics of the Heart? You tried to get rid of it.”

A quick burst of surprised laughter burbled from the other end of the line. “Who do you think bought it for your mom on our first date? It was beaten-up back then before it spent every night crammed inside your pillowcase.”

An embarrassed flush rose on Margot’s face. Maybe her hiding spot wasn’t as clever as she’d always thought.

“She loved that book,” she said, and the words came out pinched.

Loved. Past tense. The same way her mom had loved Margot. Enough to leave them behind.

It was like that rift between her parents extended to Margot, too, marooning her on an island between both of them—somehow both theirs and yet not wholly belonging to either. Not enough and yet somehow too much entirely.

He quieted before, again, saying, “I know.”

Those two syllables wormed under Margot’s skin, parasitic. They had teeth, leeching venom into her veins. “Then you also know why I’m here.”

“She’s gone.” Her dad raised his voice, saying, “Nothing you do is going to make her come back. Not even some make-believe magic treasure.”

“And what about you?” Margot asked. She tried—and honestly failed—to disguise her sniffle as a cough. “What’s your excuse? I know you didn’t leave, but you aren’t there for me either. I’m surprised we’ve talked this long, honestly. Don’t you have an open house to host or something?”

A bloated silence hung between them. As dusk settled outside, Margot’s reflection stared back at her in the window. Patchy red painted her face and neck.

“That’s enough, Margot. I’m booking another flight,” he said with finality. “No more questions.”

She hung up on him while a haze of blues swept past the window and didn’t bother scrubbing the tears from her cheeks. Coming here and piecing together the Vase was supposed to make everyone love her so that she could finally, finally, feel whole again. Instead, she was more broken than ever.

Her dad’s exhausted tone filtered through her head—his disappointment like a stake through her heart. Van was somewhere in Naples with a single fragment of painted clay the only thing keeping him alive, and the sting of betrayal every time she thought about him was like lemon juice in a paper cut.

She honestly wasn’t sure if she liked herself right now.

Not even the Vase of Venus Aurelia could fix that.