The Italian's Christmas Miracle. Lucy Gordon

for a whole week in September, then she was at home for a while. There were weekends, then another week in November. I found out afterwards that she’d spent that week in England.’

      ‘The tenth to the seventeenth?’ Alysa asked, dazed.

      ‘Was he away then?’

      ‘He said he was. He said he was going to drive north and get pictures of some wild scenery, immerse himself in the landscape, talk to nobody, even me. I tried to call him once but his phone was switched off. Then someone mentioned seeing him near his home in London. I said they were mistaken, but I guess they weren’t. He must have spent the week at home—with her.’

      ‘She was more shrewd than him,’ Drago said. ‘She never turned her mobile phone off. She used to call me every day and talk as though all was well with us.’ He drew a sudden, sharp breath.

      ‘Just like the other time, when you eloped,’ Alysa said, reading his mind.

      ‘Yes, just like then. It’s so easy to see it now.’

      ‘Did you never suspect anything?’

      ‘No. I trusted her totally. I went on being blind right up until the moment when she told me she was in love with someone else, and was leaving me for him. And do you want to hear something really funny? I didn’t believe her. I thought it wasn’t possible. Not my Carlotta, who’d been so close to me that she was like a second self. Only I’d been deluding myself. There was no second self. I’d been alone all the time and never known it.’

      ‘You felt that too?’ she asked quickly. ‘That’s it exactly—as though you’d imagined everything. And suddenly the whole world seems full of ghosts.’

      ‘And you feel as though you’re going mad,’ he confirmed. ‘In a strange way, my other self is you. I can say things to you that I could say to nobody else, and know that you’ll understand them.’

      ‘And even the words don’t always have to be said,’ she mused. ‘It’s a bit scary. To me, anyway.’

      ‘You think I’m not scared?’ he asked with grim humour. ‘Do I do that good a job of hiding it?’

      ‘Not really. Not from me.’

      ‘Exactly,’ he said in a quiet voice.

      She had a fatalistic sense that she was being drawn onwards by powers too strong for her. She’d neither wanted nor sought this alliance, but there was no escaping it.