Half Empty (First Wives, #2)(2)

“I am. It’s been nearly a year.” She knew how lame that sounded the second it left her lips.

Less than a year from I do to goodbye, she thought but didn’t say. The complication of her short marriage wasn’t something she wanted to discuss. The world didn’t need to know the truth, and she didn’t feel the need to spread gossip.

“I’m at a lack for words . . . in English or Italian,” Luciano said.

Marco walked by in that moment and glanced at the two of them. Trina watched him walk away and sighed. “We can only plan for the moment. Tomorrow isn’t promised. You’re old enough to know that.”

He placed a hand over hers. “You’re too young to say that with such conviction.”

Trina smiled. “Then I’m ahead of the game, right?”

Luciano tapped his chest and dipped his chin.

A few minutes later he left her side. Trina tossed enough euros on the table to pay for her drink and walked away.

Just the thought of her real life—the one she lived when she was pretending to be someone she wasn’t—made her want to flee.

She’d be back to see Luciano again, she knew that as she left the café. But for now, she needed to search out busy, touristy crowded streets where she could disappear.

Half a dozen switchbacks of tiny alleys framed by bridges and buildings that looked exactly like the others yet unique in their own way, and Trina found herself in Saint Mark’s Square.

The sun was starting to set, and the massive plaza had already started to fill with water. With a city destined to sink into the ocean sometime in the next hundred years, the Venetians were used to the sight, while tourists tossed off their shoes and made light of the water rising from the drains normally used to rid the square of seawater.

But for today, the city wasn’t sinking. It was simply enduring another day of lovers strolling the city and small vignettes of six-piece orchestras playing everything from classical music to modern pop while tourists drank their wine.

Trina paused in the moment.

She slipped off her sandals and walked through the ankle deep water in the center of the square.

A stranger in a wedding dress held the train of her gown and smiled into a camera.

Trina walked around until she stood at the space between the church and the sea.

I’m hiding, she thought while the world moved by. Here she was, a single woman walking the streets of a touristy Italian city where not one soul knew who—or what—she was. The anonymity of it all drove her here.

Learning the language had been an excuse.

Still, she walked through the crowd, purposely forgetting.

Here she was just Trina.

She accepted the occasional appreciative glance from the opposite sex, smiled, and moved along. Never once did she stop to try and see if that glance could turn into something else.

She wasn’t interested.

As the streets thinned out and the last of the scammers attempted to pawn their final trinkets to unknowing visitors, Trina made her way back to her nondescript hotel.

She pushed through the swinging doors of the hotel and made her way up the two flights of stairs to her corner room with a double window view of one of the canals below.

Locking the door, she tossed the key, which was still a key and not a card, onto the secretary. Moving to the windows, she opened them wide and pushed back the shutters.

The occasional pedestrian walked over the bridge closest to her room, their words muddled in her ears.

She flopped on the bed and glanced at the grandiose glass chandelier above. It was something Trina would expect to see in a hotel in Vegas.

She closed her eyes and ignored the loneliness that knocked on the back of her skull.

Everything was fine.



A loud voice had Trina shooting out of bed.

She blinked a few times, orienting herself to the room.

“I’m working here!”

“Make way!”

The voices came from outside her window. Trina glanced at the clock in the room and winced. Six thirty was too early for shouting.

While the men outside her window kept yelling at each other in Italian, she gave up and moved to see what they were arguing about.

The canal below had two side-by-side delivery boats that were manned by half a dozen men unloading supplies. Sacks of flour, cases of paper goods, everything a restaurant would need to stay in business. The man doing half the yelling was a gondolier, standing at the back of his gondola, waving a hand in the air.

“The tourists are still in bed.” This from one of the men trying to unload his boat. “You can wait.”

The problem was the lack of room between the two delivery boats for the gondola to pass.

“For God’s sake, move so the man can get through and the rest of Venezia can sleep!” Trina yelled from her window.

Seven pairs of eyes looked up at her.

Trina lifted both hands in the air as if emphasizing her point.

Three men started yelling at the same time, a mix of arguments of being in the right-of-way.

Trina leaned out farther and added her complaint to the chaos. “A bunch of grown men acting like children,” she growled.

Another window from across the canal opened and a woman twice Trina’s age let out such a rapid stream of Italian she only caught every fourth word. While Trina hadn’t been able to put it all together, it was obvious the men unloading their goods did.