Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Villa
The drive from Florence took an hour and forty minutes, and Ellie Quinn spent most of it with her forehead against the cool glass of the taxi window, watching Tuscany come in from the edges.
She had been here before, twice, for other people's weddings. She knew the cypress trees and the vineyards and the farmhouses sitting in their places with the indifference of things that predate whatever concerns you might have brought from London. She knew the way the late afternoon light came in sideways and did things to stone walls that made photographers lose their professional composure in the first ten minutes. She was prepared for all of it.
What she was less prepared for was feeling it. The last two years had given her a good working relationship with beauty at a distance — she could appreciate it, name it, photograph it with genuine attention and then go back to her room and be fine. What she had not anticipated was how Tuscany was going to get through all of that and land directly in her chest before the taxi even reached the gates.
She had her camera on her lap. She lifted it without deciding to and took the hills through the glass — the cypress trees in their long rows, the vineyard going gold — and even with the muted quality of a shot through taxi glass there was something in the frame that caught. She used to do this in the flat in Shoreditch, before. She'd be standing at the kitchen window with her coffee and she'd just raise the camera and shoot the morning light coming through the blinds, not because anyone would ever see it but because the act of framing the world always made her feel better. She still did it. She had kept that, at least.
She had been like this for six years. Ellie Quinn, wedding photographer, keeper of other people's beautiful moments. Forty-three weddings in those six years — the Cotswolds and Edinburgh and Marrakech and a rooftop in east London where it rained for twenty minutes and the couple had laughed so hard they cried and she'd got the whole sequence and it was still one of her best. She had loved every one of them. She had loved the light and the faces and the moment when two people look at each other and the rest of the room goes quiet with it. She still got tight in the chest at the top of the aisle. She still cried on the drive home sometimes, the kind of crying that isn't sad exactly but that comes when you've been carrying something precious for a long time and have finally put it down.
She was very good at her job. She'd built it from nothing — the early mornings, the second shooter work for other photographers while she built her portfolio, the years of editing at 2 AM while holding her full-time job. Then the first solo booking, and the second, and by year three the kind of word-of-mouth that meant she could be selective.
She had not always been the kind of person who was selective. She used to say yes before she'd thought it through, used to let people in on instinct, used to laugh at things before she'd decided whether they were funny. She had been, a friend told her once, the most openly trusting person she knew. That was four years ago. She wasn't sure that friend would say the same thing now.
She had not been expecting this booking.
The message came through in February — a referral, a bride named Sophie Beaumont marrying James Harrington at his family's Tuscan estate in May, and Sophie had seen Ellie's work and wanted, specifically, her. Sophie had emailed first and then called, which clients almost never did, and her voice had been warm and clear: There's something in your pictures. They look like longing. Like every photograph is someone looking at something they're afraid to lose.
Ellie had thought: yes. That's exactly what they look like. And she'd taken the booking.
She had not, at that point, known whose family villa it was.
She found out after the contract was signed and the deposit cleared. She googled the villa, then the family name, and Harrington sat on her screen in plain ordinary type and did something to her chest that she declined to examine. She stared at it. She ate toast for three days and stared at her London window and had the same conversation with herself several times running — pull out, you need the booking, pull out, you are a professional, pull out — and in the end she did not pull out.
She had told herself it was fine. It was a job. It was history, and history was finished, and she was not a person who let history stop her from doing her job.
She was currently revising this assessment.
Villa Serenova came around the last curve of the drive the way great houses do — slowly, and then all at once. The pale golden stone of the façade, the green shutters, the terrace running the full length of the ground floor with the valley beyond it, the vineyard rolling downhill in long neat rows toward a horizon that was doing something genuinely unreasonable in shades of amber and rose and deep burnished gold.
Ellie got out of the taxi. She reached back in for her camera bag. She straightened up and looked at it properly — let herself look, just for a moment — and she thought: this is the most beautiful thing I have ever been hired to photograph.
"You always did take the longest time just looking," said a voice behind her.
She went very still.
It was the voice. Not the idea of the voice, not the version she'd braced herself for in the taxi, but the actual resonance of it — the way it sat in the air of a Tuscan courtyard exactly the way it had sat in every room she'd shared with him. Like something that understood where it was.
She turned around slowly.
Leo Harrington was standing at the foot of the steps.
White linen shirt, sleeves to the elbows, dark trousers. He was leaning against the stone pillar with his arms loosely crossed, watching her the way he always had — the expression that was contained and careful and underneath all of that something else, something she'd spent four years trying to name and two more years trying to stop thinking about. He looked exactly like himself. He looked like a grey October evening two years ago, except that now they were in Tuscany in the golden light and every single thing about the temperature was wrong.
"Leo," she said. Her voice was steady. She was proud of her voice.
"Ellie." He pushed off the pillar and straightened. Something had shifted in him in two years — some weight she couldn't place, carried differently than before. "I wasn't sure you knew I'd be here."
"I found out," she said. "Later."
"Later," he said, quietly. Not a question — just the word, sitting there.
A pause. He looked at her.
"I should have warned you," he said. "I thought about calling."
"You thought about calling."
"Yes." A tightness in his jaw. "I didn't know if you'd want to hear from me."
She had approximately fifteen honest responses to this. She chose none of them. She picked up her camera bag and said, in the measured tone that had carried her through forty-three weddings and one catastrophic heartbreak: "I'm here to do a job. That's all. We're adults. It'll be fine."
Something moved in his expression that she decided not to look at directly.
"Right," he said. "Yes. Of course."
She walked past him toward the door. She was nearly through it when he said, behind her: "It's good to see you. I mean that."
She didn't turn around. She kept walking.
Inside, the entrance hall was cool marble and old frescoes and a staircase curving upward with the grace of something built for centuries of use, and Ellie stood in the middle of it with her camera bag over her shoulder and her heart making a complete mess of the professional plan, and she breathed once, and then again, and she put Leo Harrington in the place she'd been putting him for two years — the quiet part of herself for finished things — and went to find her room.
Her room was at the end of a second-floor corridor, the doors all painted a faded, particular blue that belonged to old paint in old houses, the kind of colour that gets earned over decades. The room itself: a high ceiling with exposed beams, whitewashed walls, a wrought-iron bed piled with white linen. The window opened onto the valley and the sky was doing something in every shade between gold and violet.
Ellie set her bags down and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the view.
She had been told — by Cara, by her mother, by her friend Nell who read too many romance novels and had called this whole situation very promising with a precision of optimism that Ellie had found both touching and completely maddening — that coming here was either brave or foolish. She had maintained, consistently, that it was neither. It was a job. She was a professional. Leo Harrington was the best man and she was the photographer and they were adults.
She had believed this in London.
She was finding it harder to believe it inside the same building.
She opened her camera bag. She did the inventory she always did when she arrived: each lens, each body, each battery checked, cleaned, organised. Here was the work. Here was what she knew.
Her phone buzzed.
Cara: I have arrived and I am in the most beautiful room I have ever been in and I've taken twenty-six photographs of the view already. Also I passed a very tall dark man in the corridor who smiled at me like he knew who I was. Report?
Ellie looked at this message for a moment.
Ellie: That was probably Leo. James's older brother.
A pause.
Cara: WHAT. Cara: ELLIE QUINN. Cara: You said he MIGHT not be coming. Ellie: I said I wasn't sure. Now I'm sure. Cara: Are you okay.
Ellie looked out the window. The valley was going amber in the last light, row by row, and it was so entirely beautiful that it did something inconvenient to her throat.
Ellie: Yes. Come find me before dinner.
She put the phone down. She picked her camera back up. She stood at the window and looked at the view through the lens — the old steadying trick, the world made manageable by a frame — and she breathed.
She had forty-three weddings behind her and this was the most important commission of her career. She had rebuilt herself from the floor up after the worst year of her life and she had done good work and she was proud of it. She was not going to let three days in a beautiful place come apart over a linen shirt and a voice that knew how to land.
You're fine, she told herself.
The vineyard glowed through the lens.
Cara arrived at six-thirty in a deep orange wrap dress and the expression she wore when she was waiting for the right moment to start talking.
She settled in the armchair by the window. "Tell me everything."
"There's nothing to tell," Ellie said, putting her earrings in.
"You just found out your ex-fiancé is the best man at the wedding you're shooting—"
"We were only engaged for five months. And it was two years ago."
"Ellie." Cara looked at her steadily. "You wore a ring."
She had. A simple one, white gold, that she'd kept in the back of her sock drawer for eight months before she put it in the bin. "I saw him in the courtyard," she said. "We said about four words each. I came inside."
"What four words?"
"Professional pleasantries."
Cara examined her with the focused attention of someone who knows exactly when she's being given the edited version. "He's very handsome," she said finally. "In a way that explains a great many things."
"Cara."
"I'm just completing the picture." She stood, shook out her skirt. "Come on. Dinner. We're professionals and we're here to do a job and we are absolutely not going to think about how a certain person looks in linen."
Ellie turned from the mirror. "I didn't say anything about linen."
"You didn't have to," Cara said. "I have eyes."
The welcome dinner was in the courtyard. The evening was warm enough for it, the air holding the day's heat with the easy generosity of stone that has been absorbing sun since before anyone's memory. Giulia Rossi, the wedding coordinator — a small, swift woman of forty who ran everything simultaneously and showed no outward evidence of the effort — had arranged the tables in a long line under warm lights, and there were flowers everywhere: jasmine trailing from the railing, roses in terracotta pots, something white that smelled like Tuscany had made a decision.
Ellie moved through the dinner as she always did. Not quite a guest, not quite invisible — the particular liminal position she'd made her professional home. She caught Diana Beaumont throwing her head back laughing at something Robert Harrington said. She caught George Beaumont looking at his daughter with an expression that she photographed quietly, knowing Sophie would want it someday. She caught James — the groom, Sophie's James — standing with his arm around Sophie's shoulders and a smile on his face so clear and undefended that her finger found the shutter before she'd consciously decided, and she got it.
He was, she thought, one of the most transparent people she'd ever photographed. Everything was right there on him. She liked him immediately.
When Giulia indicated she should actually eat, she took the open seat between Cara and one of the bridesmaids, which put her as far from Leo as the table allowed. She ate her food — pasta, extraordinary; bread, still warm; oil that tasted like the hills — and she kept her eyes on her plate and on the general table and not on the far end of it.
She was managing this adequately.
Then Sophie, from across the table, caught her eye. "Ellie, I'm so glad you're here. I've been looking forward to this for months."
"Me too," Ellie said, and meant it.
"Leo says you know each other." Sophie said it pleasantly, the tone of someone who has been told a thing and is curious rather than probing.
She felt Cara go slightly still beside her. She kept her expression easy. "We do. A while back."
"Small world." Sophie smiled. "Or maybe a sign."
"A coincidence," Ellie said, gently.
"Maybe," Sophie said, with a private look that Ellie couldn't fully read. "I've always found I have a great capacity for coincidences." Then the conversation moved on and the moment passed.
Ellie picked up her wine.
She glanced, finally, down the table.
Leo was looking at her. He looked away the instant she did.
She thought: three days.
She thought: I have done harder things than this.
She drank her wine — Brunello from the estate's own vineyard, genuinely excellent — and raised her camera again and went back to work.
She was always the last to leave. She moved through the emptied courtyard in the quiet she liked best — the aftermath stillness, the candlelight guttering low, the chairs at their angles, the flowers settling. She was crouching to photograph a tea rose that had fallen from the arrangement onto the pale stone when she heard footsteps.
She stood. She turned.
Leo. Two glasses of wine from the bottle the kitchen had left.
"I thought you might still be out here," he said.
She looked at him. She looked at the wine. She said nothing.
He set her glass on the low wall beside her — didn't try to hand it to her, didn't ask her to take it from him. "I wanted to say something properly." He paused, looking down at his own glass. "Not the way I said it before."
"Leo—"
"Sophie showed me your portfolio. What you've made in the last few years." He looked up. His expression did the thing it did when he was being careful and underneath the carefulness there was something else. "It's extraordinary work. Not — I don't mean extraordinary like a compliment. I mean it stopped me. Each one." A pause. "You always saw things I didn't. I thought you should know I see that now."
The jasmine was very strong. The stars above the terrace wall were coming out one by one.
Ellie picked up the wine glass from the wall. She held it without drinking. She said: "Good night, Leo."
She walked inside before anything else happened.
In her room she sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the dark valley and listened to her heart making its absolute best effort to destroy two years of careful construction, and she thought:
Three days.
Just get through three days.