Dolci di Love by Sarah-Kate Lynch Page B

onto the road, staying instead on the same tilted angle in the grass, the passenger window pressed up against a shimmering wet hedge of shiny green leaves and tiny purple flowers.
    Unemotional getting-on-with-it certainly wasn’t what she thought the future held when she and Daniel were in bed drinking wine and eating cheese out of the wrapper without even getting up for a knife on their honeymoon. She’d wanted love, happiness, laughter, fun. All the things anyone wanted when they got married.
    She’d wanted children, a family.
    It had all seemed so perfectly within reach in the beginning. They had no money and a fifth-floor walk-up that smelled horribly of mould and mothballs, but they had all those wonderful dreams. That was their wealth in those days: their limitless hope, their electrifying potential.
    It was the babies’ fault. Those smiling, pink-cheeked, plump, sweet-smelling babies with whom she had never been blessed. Their absence had just sapped the pant-peeing happiness right out of her. That’s where the laughter had gone.
    The rain fell in glassy curtains across her windshield, the wipers sweeping them open and closed. Out the window a thick mist was rolling across the fields toward her. She realised she hadn’t even brought an umbrella. She could have been in Washington.
    Tuscany? It was hard to know what all the fuss was about. And what did she think she was going to achieve in Montevedova anyway? If she found Daniel at this point she wasn’t quite sure what she would do with him. She could not begin to think how the conversation would start, let alone end. It was all so uncivilised.
    She was out of her mind coming here without a plan.
    Lily didn’t usually open an eyelid without a plan. Ever since she was a little girl, she’d liked to know what was around the corner. It had driven Rose mad for as long as she could remember. ‘Let’s just see what happens,’ Rose had said to her older sister more than once, more than a dozen times, possibly more than a hundred. ‘Try going with the flow, Lily.’
    But Lily didn’t trust the flow. The flow took frightening turns and threatening twists. She assumed it was their mother’s fault. Something about never knowing from one day to the next what ‘mood’ Carmel would be in had unsettled Lily from an early age. As soon as she worked out that if she could control a situation, the results were more predictable, she started controlling the situation.
    Nothing in Lily’s adult life had just casually cropped up. She’d orchestrated it all: Ivy League scholarship, Yale business degree, good job, handsome husband, great salary. Even the view from their apartment on Seventy-second Street was pretty much the one she’d always had in mind and just needed to find and acquire within her predestined time frame.
    The only dream she hadn’t been able to make come true were her three beautiful children: Edward, after Daniel’s father; Rose, after Rose and then either Amelia or Angus, depending.
    She’d persevered with this plan every bit as hard as she had for anything else, if not harder: She’d tried IVF treatments, egg donation, surrogate motherhood, and—finally—adoption. She bit her lip and shook away that memory. It didn’t matter because in the end it had all come to nothing.
    The sharp rat-a-tat-tat of someone knocking at her window brought her smartly back to the present. Flustered, she scrambled to press the right button to open the window, first accidentally locking all the doors, then opening the passenger window before finally her own.
    â€˜Continue straight ahead,’ chirruped Dermott, who had been maintaining a haughty silence until then. ‘Continue straight ahead.’
    Rattled, Lily looked up to see an Italian man of about her own age bending in beneath a huge white umbrella to look at her. His hair was curly and shoulder length, his eyes brown and