The last memory was one from which he still shied away. They’d made love in the afternoon and she’d left him in the evening, promising to return in the morning. He’d lain awake that night, vowing to bring things to a head the next day.

But the next day there had been no sign of her.

He’d waited and waited, but she hadn’t appeared. One day had become two, then three.

He had never seen her again.

Now he stood in the shower, his eyes closed, keeping out the world. But at last he opened them and switched off the water.

Then he tensed.

She was there, just outside the shower, her shadow outlined on the glass. She was waiting for him.

He moved fast, hurling himself against the glass so hard that he nearly broke it, reaching out, trying to find her.

But his hands touched only air. There was nobody there. She had been an illusion as, perhaps, she had always been. He stood there alone, shaking with the ferocity of his memories.

He dried himself mechanically, trying to force himself to be calm. It shamed him to be out of control.

That was the mantra he’d lived by since the day she’d vanished into thin air. Control. Never let anyone suspect the turmoil of joy and misery that had destroyed and remade him.

He’d returned to Italy, apparently the same man as before. If his rambunctious hard living had been a little forced, his manner more emphatic, nobody had seemed to notice. He had kept his memories a secret, sharing them with nobody in the world-until tonight.

With Evie he’d come closer to confiding than with anyone else, ever. But he wasn’t a man who easily discussed feelings, or even knew what his own feelings were much of the time. So he’d gone just so far before retreating into silence.

Today, at his brother’s wedding, he’d sensed that Carlo had found a secret door and gone through it, closing it behind him.