The Amalfi coast in early spring was the kind of beautiful that felt slightly unreal — the sort of place that existed in the pages of the novels Jane had spent years reading and that she had privately assumed was somewhat exaggerated by writers who liked adjectives.
It was not, she discovered, exaggerated at all.
The villa was perched on a cliff above the sea, white-walled and terracotta-roofed, surrounded by lemon trees and the smell of salt air and a particular quality of light that Jane's entire north-England and London upbringing had not prepared her for. Warm. Golden. The kind that made even practical people want to pause and simply be in it for a moment, blinking slightly, as though the light itself required adjustment.
The lemon trees were heavy with fruit, their branches dipping low over the stone path that wound from the villa's side entrance to the terrace. Jane had trailed her fingers along one as she'd walked past the evening of their arrival, half-expecting it to be decorative, artificial — something placed there for effect. It had been entirely real. The skin of the fruit rough and waxy under her fingertips, the sharp clean scent rising immediately.
She stood on the terrace the morning after their arrival and looked out at the flat blue sea and felt something in her chest loosen that she hadn't known was tight.
The sea here was not like the sea she knew. The North Sea, which was the sea of her childhood, was grey and honest and completely without pretension — it did not try to be beautiful and on most days succeeded in being merely cold. This sea was different. It lay flat and bright and almost impossibly blue beneath the morning light, the kind of blue that painters argued about, and it seemed entirely at ease with its own loveliness in a way that felt almost personal.
"Better than Russia?" Dimitri's voice, from behind her.
"That is," Jane said, "genuinely one of the lowest bars in the history of comparative assessments."
She heard — she was certain she heard — a sound from him that was very close to a quiet laugh. She turned, but his expression was controlled again. Just. There was something around the corners of his mouth that hadn't quite finished retreating.
"I'll take that as a yes," he said.
The Italian property was different from the Russian estate in ways that seemed to reflect different selves. Where Russia had been dark and massive and winter-heavy — all stone corridors and high ceilings and the particular silence of a house built to withstand something — this place was open and light and breathed differently. The windows here were wide and unguarded-feeling. The ceilings were lower. The floors were cool pale tile rather than dark wood, and the rooms smelled of old plaster and citrus and something floral she couldn't identify that drifted in off the hillside each morning when the windows were opened.
The books on its shelves were in Italian and French alongside the Russian and English. There was a kitchen garden running along the south wall, orderly rows of herbs and early vegetables tended by someone who took the work seriously. There were no wolves.
Irina had not come — she was back in Moscow, managing the estate. In her place there was a young Italian woman named Sofia who communicated primarily in gestures and excellent food and seemed entirely uninterested in the geopolitics of her employer's situation. She fed them without ceremony and without apparent curiosity, and Jane found her restful in a way she hadn't anticipated. Sofia asked nothing. She simply produced food that was quietly extraordinary and went back to whatever she was doing, and this felt, after weeks of careful observation from all sides, like a genuine luxury.
Jane found she had more freedom here. The cliff and the sea on three sides made the logistics of escape the same — unviable — but the gates of the property were less obviously guarded, and she was permitted to walk in the grounds and, eventually, on the narrow cliff path that hugged the edge of the headland and looked out over the water.
She used these walks to think. The Mediterranean was good for thinking — its steadiness, its vast indifference, the way it went about its own enormous business regardless of the small human dramas playing out on its shores. It had been here before her and would be here long after, and standing at the edge of it put things in a proportion that was sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes exactly what was needed.
She had been here four days when Dimitri joined her on the cliff path. He appeared from the direction of the villa, coat over his arm, and fell into step beside her without asking or explaining.
They walked in silence for a while. The sea was very blue. The path was narrow and slightly uneven, the stones worn smooth by years of feet and weather, and the drop to the left was considerable — not dangerous if one was paying attention, but not entirely forgiving either. The kind of path that required a certain degree of presence.
Their arms occasionally touched. Neither of them moved away.
"How long?" Jane asked finally. "Until London is resolved."
"A week. Perhaps two."
"And then I go home."
"Yes." A pause that lasted a beat longer than it needed to. "If that's what you want."
She looked at him. The sea wind was doing something to his hair that made him look, for once, less like a boardroom and more like a person. Less like something assembled and maintained and more like something simply existing in a place. It was disconcerting in a way she was becoming used to being disconcerted by him.
"That's a strange thing to say," she said.
"Is it?" He looked at the sea.
Jane thought about what she wanted to say and what she should say and what the distance between those two things had become over the past weeks — how it had started very wide and was now something she could almost step across without trying.
"Ask me again in a week," she said.
He looked at her then. The wind moved between them. The sea went on being the sea. And there was something in his expression — unguarded, quiet, unarmoured in a way she had only seen in fragments before — that she did not look away from.
"All right," he said.
They walked back to the villa without speaking. But the silence, Jane noticed, had changed its character entirely.