The Rome Affair

Laura Caldwell

The Rome Affair

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Coming Next Month

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my editor, Margaret O’Neill Marbury, my agent, Maureen Walters, and the crew at MIRA—Donna Hayes, Dianne Moggy, Loriana Sacilotto, Katherine Orr, Craig Swinwood, Sarah Rundle, Don Lucey, Steph Campbell, Margie Miller, Rebecca Soukis, Carolyn Flear, Kathy Lodge, Dave Carley, Gordy Giohl, Erica Mohr and Andi Richman.

Thanks to everyone who read the book—

Christi Caldwell, Katie Caldwell Kuhn, Kelly Harden, Clare Toohey, Mary Jennings Dean, Pam Carroll, Karen Uhlman, Joan Posch, Dustin O’Regan, Beth Kaveny, Jane Jacobi Mawicke, Ted McNabola and Kris Verdeck.

Thanks also to those who helped me with my tireless questions about murder prosecutions, including Detective Kevin Armbruster, criminal defense attorney Catharine O’Daniel, former prosecutor James Lydon and former police officer Giovanna Long.

Most of all, thank you, thank you, thank you to Jason Billups.

Prologue

She sees lights. Lights in the sky—stars, she corrects herself—and lights from beautiful apartments with accomplished people inside. She is close to those people right now, very close, but she wonders if any of them will notice her dying.

She has never been the type to imagine her own death. In fact, she has felt immune to it, as if death was something that happened to other people. She always assumed there was time.

But there is precious little time left. It has been only an instant since it started, and she knows there are maybe one or two such moments left.

And strangely, there is relief.

1

I understand now that innocence is relative. I know that the night before I left for Rome, I felt jaded. After all we’d been through, I thought I’d aged somehow and lost my sparkle. I only wish I’d grasped then that the fall from innocence was a very long one.

“Why do you want to go to Italy with Kit?”

Nick sat on the bed and watched through the bathroom doorway as I went about my nighttime ministrations—cleanser, toner, moisturizer, eye cream. Why I used all this crap, I wasn’t sure.

“I have a pitch at that architectural firm, and you can’t go because of work,” I answered. I leaned toward the mirror and dabbed cream around my left eye.

“You’ve hardly seen Kit in years,” Nick said.

“You don’t have to see a friend to be a friend.”

Although Kit had been a bridesmaid in our wedding four years ago, she’d moved to California shortly after to try her hand at acting. We didn’t talk every week, or even every month, but we never lost the bond best girlfriends have. After a few years of escalating credit-card debt and many failed auditions, Kit was back in Chicago, and I was more grateful than ever to have her near. At thirty-five, most of my friends were moms—what I thought I’d be, too—and they were no longer available for nights at wine bars, let alone trips to Rome.

“Why are you so worked up about this?” I asked Nick.

“I’m not, Rachel. I’m just curious.”

But my husband, Dr. Nick Blakely, was worked up. I could tell from the way he ran his fingers through his curly, close-clipped hair and rubbed at the spot between his eyes. He was also acting overly casual. His tie was loosened after a long day seeing patients, and he leaned back with one hand on the creamy ivory sheets of our bed, but there was a stiffness to the way he held himself.

“You have to be careful in Italy,” he continued. “Especially with the guys.”

“Is that right?” This came out sounding a bit like a taunt, and I let it hang in the air.

How strange that after all the therapy, after all the crying and the repiecing of our relationship, it was Nick who worried about me, as if retribution lay in wait around a corner somewhere.

“Nick, I’ve traveled to Rome before. I lived in Italy.”

“You were twelve when you lived there with your family, and it was for six months. And since then you’ve always traveled with me. Now it’s just you and Kit. I mean, I’m glad you’re going with someone, but you still have to be careful,” Nick said. “There are all sorts of guys who love to prey on American women.”

“I am quite sure I can handle the Italian men,” I said.

I took a second’s pleasure in the stricken look that flitted across his face, but even now, I hated to see him hurt.

“Nick,” I said, moving to the bed and sitting on his lap. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

On Saturday, Nick dropped Kit and me at O’Hare airport. The arrival gates were mobbed with cars and cabs, all with doors and trunks ajar. The May air was balmy, with sudden gusts of wind that sent stray papers floating into the air.

“Golden Girl,” Nick murmured, hugging me fiercely.

That nickname of mine had started with Kit. “Golden Child,” she used to call me when we were growing up. It was mostly based on my last name—Goldin—but it was also because I was an only child of relatively affluent parents, and I had, quite simply, enjoyed a very nice time of it. I knew that was true, even when I was young.

When I met Nick at an art-gallery party in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood, he immediately began calling me Golden Girl. Again there was my name, and Nick said he saw a gold light in my pale green eyes, too.

When we got married, despite changing my name to Blakely, I felt so lucky and so special I thought I would be the Golden Wife. I thought I’d have the Golden Life.

So far, it hadn’t turned out exactly like that.

I hugged Nick back, thinking that it was usually he who went away on business trips, leaving me at home, saying little prayers that the paper he had to present would go smoothly, that he was sleeping okay and not drinking too much or eating too poorly. But I was ready for some girls’ time with Kit. Now it was his turn.

Nick finally let me go but held one of my hands in his. He looked at Kit. “Have a nice time,” he said formally.

Nearly everyone talked to Kit that way since she’d returned from L.A. No one knew what to do with her, I suppose. She hadn’t quite found a career, she didn’t have a boyfriend or husband. She’d been a struggling actress in L.A., a hard-luck existence most of us in Chicago had little in common with. And yet Kit also had a sparkly kind of mystery about her. Even now, she wore rose-colored mirrored sunglasses and a taupe chiffon scarf around her neck, her rusty red hair tousled artfully. If she took off the glasses, you could see that her blue eyes were almost purple, depending on what she was wearing, and those eyes had a sly, knowing way about them. She looked like an intriguing woman, a Hollywood starlet on the lam. As one of her closest friends, though, I knew she was hurting from her failures out West.

“Thanks, Nick.” She smiled at him.

I breathed a sigh of gratitude for that grin. Those who knew about our marital problems were furious at Nick. They either refused to talk to him, or they made snide remarks when they did. I knew he was getting sick of being the whipping boy, and I didn’t like it, either. Although I could taunt him and stalk away all I wanted, I didn’t want anyone else treating him badly.

“Meet you at the ticket counter?” I said to Kit.

She readjusted the scarf around her neck. “Sure thing.”

I turned to him when she’d left. “What are you going to do while I’m gone?”

“Work. Miss you like crazy.”

I smiled. “Get some sleep, huh?”

Nick and I spent our evenings together again, but after I’d gone to bed, he would work late into the night on a new paper, hoping it would bring him a partnership. He’d gone into plastic surgery not for the glamour surgeries and the money they brought, but for the real treatments that could help people. But now that he was at the best plastic surgery office in the city, he had to perform those glam surgeries, and he had to publish to get promoted to partner.

“I doubt I’ll get much sleep,” Nick said. “I’ve got to take a couple of board members to dinner, too.”

“When do they decide?”

He rolled his eyes. “A month or so.”

Despite his feigned nonchalance, Nick was anxious about making it on The Chicago General Auxiliary Board—what everyone in the city called The board. It was a group of handpicked young and influential people who threw parties, ostensibly to raise funds for Chicago General Hospital, where Nick was on staff, but really to identify themselves as the crème de la crème of Chicago society. Nick wanted to get on the board not only to improve his chances of becoming partner, but also because he’d always been a member of the in-crowd growing up in Philadelphia. His father was a longstanding politician, and although the Blakelys had never been wealthy, they were exceptionally well connected and admired. They were invited to every soiree and function in town. When Nick took off for med school, and eventually his residency in Chicago, he said he was leaving Philly so that he wouldn’t ride his family’s coattails. But the limelight was a place where Nick was accustomed to being. He missed it. And although I could be just as happy in our basement painting my black-and-white photos as I could be at a grand charity ball, I supported Nick. I’d known our social life would be a busy one.

Nick kissed me on the forehead. “Good luck with your sales pitch, hon.”

I closed my eyes, leaned into him and inhaled the warm scent he always carried, as if he’d just come in from the sun. “Thanks. And really, Nick, make sure you sleep enough.”

“You know I only sleep with you.”

We both froze for a second. It was the kind of remark that was supposed to be light, but was now only a reference to what used to be true.

“Seriously,” Nick said, rushing in to fill the silence, to fix it. “I meant I’ll be up all night because I won’t know what to do without you.”

I took a step back and looked away. To my right, a dad struggled to extract a stroller from the trunk of his car. That was the kind of problem I thought Nick and I would be having at this point—how to fit the stroller in the car, where to put the crib, what color to paint the nursery.

“Rachel,” Nick said. “I’m sorry.”

I knew he was sick of apologizing, and the truth was, I was getting sick of hearing it.

“C’mere,” he said, pulling me to him again.

He kissed me, and despite myself, I responded. Before, we had been like everyone else. Now, we were passionate people, fighting for our relationship, and Nick was a man who couldn’t get enough of me.

“Be careful, okay?” he said, holding my face in his hands.

“Nick, I’m not gone that long.”

“Tell me you’ll be careful.”

“Of course I will be. I’ll strap my purse around me tight. I’ll watch out for gypsies.”

He studied my face. “I’ll miss you,” he whispered.

“I love you,” I said in response, because that was true, and it might not have been true to say I’d miss him.

2

It’s been said that Rome lacks the languid, friendly allure of other Italian cities, but the Roman mornings, at least to me, are undeniably charming. The colors stun the mind—the thousand shades of gold that are impossible to capture on film or in memory. Even when I’ve taken black-and-white photos of the city and painted on them, I can’t adequately capture a Roman morning—the way the sun gives a misty yellow glow to every corner of the city.

It was that pale yellow blush that struck me as we stepped out of our cab, just around the corner from the Piazza di Spagna.

“Wow,” Kit murmured for at least the tenth time since we’d landed. She embraced me as the cabbie lugged our bags from the trunk. “You are amazing for bringing me here.”

I had used most of my air miles to upgrade us both, and I had paid a few hundred dollars of Kit’s ticket, as well. Since moving back from L.A., Kit was short on cash. Not that this was anything new. I’d known Kit since first grade, and ever since her father died a few years after that, money had been tight. I used to pay her way into the movies and buy her bracelets at Claire’s Boutique so she could be like the rest of the girls. Money was even scarcer now. Kit told people she worked “in the marketing department of the Goodman Theatre,” which was true and sounded respectable enough, but the plainer truth was she was the department secretary. She collated, she stapled, she answered phones. She made very little money. What she had usually went toward the bills surrounding her mom’s cancer treatment.

“I’m glad to do it,” I told Kit, squeezing her hand. I was filled with a giddy feeling of promise, of a friendship renewed and, with the exception of my sales pitch tomorrow, a few days away from reality.

Kit and I checked into Il Palazzetto, a restored palazzo near the Spagna subway station. My mother had been to Rome the previous summer with her new husband, a real-estate mogul much older than she, and they’d stayed for two months at Il Palazzetto. She insisted Kit and I would be crazy to book anyplace else. When we stepped into the small foyer, I could see why.

The floor was a mosaic of colored stone. Sunlight flooded down the spiral marble staircase with its twisted, wrought-iron railings. On the second floor, our room had soaring ceilings, Roman columns and walls draped with gauzy, flowing fabric.

I opened the French window of our room, just in time to catch the sight of the pristine, white sun hitting the Spanish Steps.

I smiled over my shoulder at Kit.

“This is going to be good,” she said. Her voice told me she was excited in a way she hadn’t been in a long time. “This is going to be really good.”

I turned back toward the Roman morning and nodded.

Nearly everyone loves Italy. An adult who says, “Oh, I adore Italy” is like a child who says “I love Disneyland.” Of course you do.

The funny thing is that Italophiles believe it is they who have discovered Italy. They feel this love of all things Italian—the food, the ocher sunsets, the wine, the slow-moving life—which begins when they set foot on the dusty streets of Rome and ends when they head home. Every Italophile senses it is he who loves Italy more than the next, who understands her more deeply than the rest.

Kit and I were no exception. We had only three days to spend in Rome, so instead of sleeping the day away, we pushed past our jet lag and out into the city for a walk and some coffee.

We found a neighborhood bar in Piazza Navona, a long, U-shaped square with a tall obelisk and a Bernini sculpture and fountain in the middle. The piazza used to host chariot races, but now held cafés and strolling pedestrians.

“God, I needed this,” Kit said as we took our seat in front of the bar, our cappuccinos and a basket of rolls in front of us. She flipped back the napkin and offered the basket to me. I took a crescent roll, and she did the same.

“Me, too,” I said. “How’s your mom?”

She shrugged, her taupe chiffon scarf lifting around her face. “She’s doing everything she’s supposed to, but she knows the chemo is killing her at the same time it’s supposed to be curing her.”

“That’s horrible.” I thought how lucky I was to have two healthy parents. Healthy, divorced, never-speak-to-each-other parents, but who could knock it? “I’m sorry,” I said. Ineffective words.

“We’ll be all right.” Kit shook her hair away from her face. That wavy russet hair was one of the things that drew people to Kit. Not just men, who were staring at her even now as they passed us on their way to work, but the women, too. Her hair was glamorous, fiery—two traits most women wanted a little more of.

“God, look at her, will you?” Kit nodded toward a gaunt, striking Italian woman who was crossing the piazza. She wore a short black skirt and a pink shawl. Her black hair was swept up in a knot atop her head, and she clicked past us smartly in four-inch herringbone stilettos, despite the treacherous cobblestones.

“What do you think?” Kit said. “She’s in advertising, right? Or maybe fashion?”

“She could be a secretary. Even the civil servants here are dressed to kill.”

“Right, but her husband has money. She’s definitely married.”

We both peered at the woman’s left hand, and sure enough, there was a diamond ring that looked large even from a distance. “You got it,” I said.

This was a game Kit liked to play—guessing at people’s lives, then inserting herself mentally into those lives as far as she could. It was what had led her to acting.

Kit turned back to me. “Speaking of being married,” she said, “how’s Nick?”

“Fine. I think.”

“You think?” Kit’s eyes narrowed in concern.

After Nick’s affair last year, which took place over the span of a weeklong medical seminar in Napa, he had confessed months later. It was a Tuesday night, and I was slicing a tomato for salad. The time was 8:07 p.m. I remember this, because I held the knife in one hand and the large tomato in the other. The tomato’s juice was seeping like blood, and it suddenly seemed obscene, morbid. I checked the microwave clock, wondering if I had a few minutes before Nick came home to make something else, something more benign like spinach salad.

I hadn’t heard the door open, but I heard the creak of a floorboard in our house on Bloomingdale Avenue. Nick stepped into our kitchen and began crying so hard, his immaculate doctor’s hands cradling his face, that I thought someone had died. He had no idea why he’d done it, he said. He could only say that he wanted—needed—something new. He had felt it like a constant, terrible itch. But now the only thing new was how much he hated himself. I stood silently through his confession. When I found my voice, I begged him to tell me it was only one night. I might be able to deal with only one night. Nick shook his head and cried some more.

I made him move out for three months. I walked around stripped bare, so that the most mundane things inspired tears. During that time, I realized that infidelity is about much more than the physicality of the act. Of course, the physical can’t be ignored. The raw images of Nick with some other woman—their mouths clinging, bodies locked—hounded me, even made me do the clichéd run to the toilet with my hand over my mouth. Despite my mental gymnastics to avoid such thoughts, I always imagined the woman as gorgeous, maybe with gleaming, honey-colored hair and a strong, tanned body. This helped, strangely, because it gave some reason to what Nick had done. He had been lured in by someone stunning—someone tall and blond and entirely different from me, with my small frame and dark hair.

She wasn’t anything special, Nick told me at least a hundred times, just someone he met at a Napa restaurant. He knew it was his fault, not hers, but he still hated her now that it was done. He hated Napa. He hated the restaurant where he’d met her.

It was at this point in these discussions I always held up my hand. “Stop. Please,” I’d say. Although I had an image of her in my mind, I didn’t really want to know about this woman. I didn’t want to hear about the restaurant where she waitressed or maybe that she was supporting a child or that her sister had died the previous year. I didn’t want anything to overly personalize her.

I stayed with him because, unlike Nick, I did not want something new. I wanted him, and us, and a family, and everything I’d invested in. Before he’d told me, we’d been ready to get pregnant. But instead of a baby, Nick’s infidelity got us a therapist, Robert Conan, whom we’d seen twice a week until recently.

Conan told me that the glorification of this woman as an Amazonian goddess was “certainly not healthy,” but it was the only way I could cope. I chose to view the woman as an otherworldly, goddess-type creature who’d floated into Nick’s path one day, led him astray for five nights, and then left our world, hopefully for the very hot hallways of hell.

Nick and I were officially back together, but I still had a hard time.

“One minute it’s like we’re back to normal,” I told Kit, “then the next he’ll say something or I’ll say something and we’ll remember.”

“And then?”

I took a bite of croissant. It was flaky and buttery but suddenly hard to swallow. “And then it’s awful.”

Sometimes I was in love with Nick, proud of how we’d weathered the storm that had swept through our lives. Sometimes—when I picked up a wine from Napa Valley or saw a TV show about infidelity—my insecurity raged. Sometimes I hated him.

“God, now I’m sorry,” Kit said. “What a sad pair we are.” She put her cup down and threw an arm around my shoulders, hugging me across the table.

I hugged her back. Throughout high school, college and my early years in Chicago, my life had been refracted through the lens of my girlfriends’ eyes, particularly Kit’s. When I got married and she’d moved, I thought I didn’t need the insights or affirmations as often. But now, to be in the company of a friend gave me an optimistic charge. A good bout of girlfriend bonding was exactly what I needed.

Over Kit’s shoulder, I saw the sun moving across the piazza and beginning to warm the gray stone man in the center of the sculpture. Water splashed from the fountain, cleansing him.

Sitting back, I raised my cup. “Let’s have a toast. To Italy, and to a wonderful few days of escape.”

“To fabulous fucking friends!” Kit said. She let out a little holler, which drew looks from the people in the bar, and we touched our cups together.

Kit and I spent a languid first day, moving from one overpriced store on the Corso to the next, laughingly enduring the saleswomen who glanced pityingly at our American fashions and wondered out loud (they didn’t know I understood) whether we could afford the skirts we were looking at.

We were giddy and goofy from lack of sleep, and this was Italy. Nothing bad could touch us. We had dinner on the Via Veneto, doted on by the rotund proprietress who was different in every way from the saleswomen we’d encountered.

“Eat! Eat!” she kept saying. “You are nothing but bones.”

Food kept appearing at our table like wrapped presents under the tree—saffron risotto with gold leaves, pink salmon drizzled green with dill sauce. So, too, the men appeared. “Married,” I kept murmuring, holding aloft my left hand, reveling in the attention but somehow proud again of my marital status, while Kit grinned and flirted and sent them away, even as they sent us sparkling decanters of chianti. We tripped home arm in arm, laughing with memories already made.

But the next morning I was walloped by a bout of jet lag that made the previous day’s tiredness seem like child’s play. I couldn’t believe I had to attend a meeting, much less make a lengthy pitch on complicated architectural software.

I showered, but it failed to wake me up. I left Kit in her sumptuous bed, with plans to see her after my meeting. I headed for a neighborhood bar, where I downed two espressos, neither of which had any effect other than to make me blink more often and feel more dazed.

A twenty-minute cab ride took me over the muddy Tiber River and through Trastevere, onto a tiny, winding, cobblestone street with stone palazzi on either side. The driver stopped and pointed at an iron gate with the number thirteen etched in the stucco. When I got out of the car, I saw a small brass plaque announcing Rolan & Cavalli, the largest architectural firm in Italy. A twinge of anticipation fluttered in my belly.