The Girl Behind The Curtain (Hidden Women) Read Online Free PDF Page A

he had trusted her too.
     
    What would have happened if he’d dared to show himself to her that day, as she’d asked? Might they have made love for real? He thought about it often. He’d wanted her so much.
    Each evening, after she left the library to go home, he would let himself into the library and take her place at the desk. He would read the pages she had been reading. He would brush them with his fingers, as though touching something she had touched so recently could somehow draw them closer.
    Once, she left a glove behind. It had fallen unnoticed from the pocket of her coat as she dressed to go back to her apartment in the Dorsoduro and lay forgotten on the mat by the fire. As soon as he could, Marco went straight to retrieve it. He snatched it up and pressed it to his face as though it still contained Sarah’s hand. There was a faint scent of perfume on the wool at the glove’s wrist. Marco inhaled it. There was something familiar in its echo. He kept the glove, hoping that Sarah would think she had dropped it somewhere other than the palazzo. And when eventually he worked out that the perfume she wore was Iris Nobile by Acqua Di Parma, he had Silvio buy a bottle. It sat wrapped up in a desk drawer. A gift he never gave.
    Marco still had the glove. It was in his bedroom, in the bedside cabinet. At one point, he had taken it out every night and held it for a moment before he went to sleep. Such a silly thing. The sort of thing a teenage girl would do, he berated himself, but it was the closest he had come to a woman’s touch in so long. Until that night in February at the Martedì Grasso ball.
     
    Sarah could have had no idea how hard it had been for him to make the decision to meet her at last. While Silvio oversaw arrangements for the party, Marco prepared a thousand opening lines. He was as frightened as any young boy planning to meet his first love. No; more frightened. He had so much to lose and so many reasons to expect that she would not want him. That’s why he had chosen to throw the party. It was easy for him to entice her there and easy for him to disappear if it all went wrong. He’d sent the dress to mark her out – exactly as she had suspected – so that he would not have to risk wasting his confidence and energy on anyone but her. The possibility of rejection was so high. He’d felt sick with anxiety and yet he’d still decided that it was worth taking the risk. Sarah had enchanted him. Before he knew it, she would have finished her research and flown back to London. He wanted to give her a reason to stay. He had to make a move before she left.
    If she had known how hard it was for him even to admit to himself that’s what he desired, she would never have allowed what happened to happen.
    Marco felt he had been waiting for hours when the girl in the dress arrived. Though she held a mask to her face, he knew at once that something was not right. The mask was not the one he had given her, for a start. And though she was the right height and the dress was the perfect fit, this girl did not move like Sarah. Sarah’s way of moving was elegant but modest. This other girl – her friend Bea, as he would find out – sashayed into the room. She didn’t so much walk as dance.
    Marco had no time to evade her. He was too slow to move behind a bookcase and she spotted him as soon as she stepped into the room. She flirted with him. She was the kind of girl who would flirt with anyone, was Marco’s guess. She dared him to take his mask off and when he refused, she made a grab for his hand.
    Her face had said it all.
    Marco had not looked in a mirror for a decade and that night was no exception. In order to reveal himself to Sarah, he had had to convince himself that it was not so bad. Bea’s expression – her mouth open in shock when she saw his burnt hand – told him that he was kidding himself. His hand wasn’t even the worst of it.
    Once he had seen how Bea struggled to contain her reaction,