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

and again. She had put her fears to one side and kept trying to break through. Who was he to tell her she was wrong? Perhaps she really did love him for his heart and his mind. Perhaps the way he looked really didn’t matter to her. It wasn’t impossible.
    But then she did not know the whole truth, did she? She had not believed him when he told her his outer appearance was a manifestation of inner corruption and cowardice. If she knew the truth, she would finally see him differently and no amount of kind-heartedness would be able to get past the way he looked then.
    Marco silenced the optimistic voice again.
    Alone in his secret office, he hid his favourite drawing of Sarah inside his own diary, alongside the real story. The ugly truth.

Chapter 4
    Berlin, September last year
    I couldn’t sleep on my first night in Germany. I got into bed, but the strange room and the unfamiliar sounds of the house settling down for the night meant I could only lie beneath the duvet with my eyes wide open, watching shadows pass across the ceiling, wondering if that noise I heard was a creaking pipe or footsteps on the stairs.
    Eventually I gave in and got up. It was too late to watch television so I decided I would do some virtual housekeeping. My email in-box was full of messages I didn’t need to keep. In the darkness of the night, with only the light of my screen to illuminate the room, I responded to all those emails I had been meaning to take care of for months. They weren’t urgent, but they were still important. I made myself some camomile tea, then I set about bringing old friends and colleagues up to speed with what I was doing. I sent out belated birthday greetings – some so late it was easier to call them early for the following year – and gave my take on gossip doubtless long since gone cold. Apart from those who were closest to me, I had been neglecting my friendships over the past nine months. When Steven and I first broke up, I’d hidden myself away because I didn’t want to have to explain what had happened. Then came my trip to Venice, then Paris, then a summer on the road. It was time to reconnect at last.
    It was also time to do some weeding.
    When I had finished dealing with the current emails, I turned my attention to those I had saved over the years. I had a file full of emails from Steven. Hundreds of them: from the effusive ten-page-long love poems we sent to each other at the very beginning of our relationship to the curt ‘Please remember milk’ notes that characterised the end. I didn’t bother to open them but I decided against deleting them too. It no longer hurt me to see them and one day, I thought, I might like to reread some of the early ones.
    But then I came to another file. It was titled ‘Marco’ and it contained everything we had ever written to each other that hadn’t been committed to paper. It was home to all our emails and screen-grabs of our direct messages. Every digital missive we’d sent one another, from Marco’s first response to my letter asking if I might visit the library, to my email telling him that I knew he was behind the ‘out of the blue’ job for the film company making Augustine du Vert’s biopic. The only other things I had to remind me of our strange relationship were Marco’s first and last handwritten letters: the first letter inviting me to the palazzo and the other asking me to give up on him and not come back again. They were tucked into my notebook, next to the rose I had stolen from his garden. The flower, which I had pressed between two pieces of paper, was now so dried out and delicate it was starting to crumble and I had read Marco’s farewell letter so often that it too was in danger of falling apart, having been unfolded and folded so many times. I didn’t need to open it again. I knew its sad paragraphs by heart.
    I opened the computer file. The list of contents I found there was innocuous. Looking at it didn’t hurt so much, but I knew that if