Day 188 – Writing exercise

…

When you look back and think about certain aspects of your life and wonder, for that fraction of a second, if you had done one thing differently, it would have made a difference.

Some well-meaning relative had said, thinking that I was not near enough to overhear, that my insistence on wanting to see the Pont d’veccio in Florence was ‘a bridge too far’, was the reason why Alexandra was dead, was not fair.

But in a literal sense it was true.  Had I not insisted, she would still be alive, and that was true.

I was standing there right now, practically in the same place, at the same time, and the memory of what happened came flooding back.

Richard Wyler, Alexandria’s high school boyfriend, had appeared out of the crowd of tourists, now grown more devilishly handsome than he had been at school.

Her eyes lit up when she saw him, nearly all of 20 years later; they saw each other, and it was like I was not there.  I had known, even from the moment I met her, she had not forgotten him, even though he had abandoned her.

I had never believed that after he left I would have any sort of chance with her.  None of us in the year did, but it happened; we dropped together at college, got jobs in New York, kept bumping into each other and five years later got married.

It wasn’t until the children themselves went to college that we decided to go on the grand tour of Europe, the honeymoon we had planned but never got to take, what with one thing or another.

We got to Florence; the first few days were glorious, and then Richard appeared.

That morning a change had come over her.  One minute everything was fine; she was going down to the front desk to get a map of Florence before we went for a walking tour to round out the experience. 

She went down happier than I had seen her in years.  When she came back, it was like she was a completely different person.  I had asked her if everything was alright, but she wouldn’t tell me.

I asked her if she wanted to stay in, rest, if things had caught up and she was feeling tired, but she said I wanted to go, so we did.

And by the time we got to the bridge, I was ready to just walk away and leave her to gather her thoughts.  Then Richard appeared, and instantly she had changed again.  Back to that giddy effervescent teenager she had been back then.

Clearly she wanted to spend some time with him, and I knew and trusted her to spend some time with him, thinking it would push away the bad mood she was in.

Until she didn’t come back, and I could not get her on her cell phone.  Of course I was a little disappointed she had called to tell me that she was spending some more time with him, so I let it go.

She would come back when she was ready.

Until she had not returned the next morning.  That’s when I got worried.  He phone was now officially dead, the battery having given out.  It was one of her quirks, never remembering to charge it overnight. 

Again I waited until lunchtime, though I was not sure of my reasoning, before I went to the police

That in itself was the worst five hours of my life, going through a succession of officers saying the same answers to the same set of questions over and over.

Until I finally found an officer of the Gendarmerie who could speak English, and started asking more serious questions.  It was she who had just been advised of an unidentified American woman who had been taken to hospital with serious wounds.

She could not say the exact nature of the circumstances but accompanied me to the hospital to see if it might be Alexandria.  I thought it impossible; it had to be someone else.

When we arrived, she was advised the patient had just died.  I felt a cold shiver go through me, the sort that felt like an omen.

Getting from the front foyer of the hospital, the rather room on the fourth floor seemed to take an eternity, the corridor full of police and hospital staff.  The room was cleared, and after a few minutes, she came out to take me in.

I knew the moment I stepped through the door.  When they drew back the sheet, I collapsed.  It was like my whole world had been pulled from under me.

It was her.

…

Several people asked me if I was alright; that moment I saw her face had hit me as hard now as it had then, and I had to stop myself from falling over.

How had she died?

She had been shot.  Not alone.  Whoever had killed her had also killed Richard Wyler.  And, it appeared he had been the intended target, and Alexandra had been caught in the crossfire.

She had been alive when they found her, in another hotel, on an island on the other side of the city.

Of course, the Italian police had taken my statement when I had sought their assistance in finding her, and had made the mistake of mentioning Wyler’s importance and relationship to her, and drew all the wrong conclusions.

And for the next week I had to find a lawyer and try to prove to them that I had not shot both of them in a jealous rage. Fortunately? In the end, the hotel was able to provide CCTV of the actual shooter, and it didn’t look like me.

But I have to prove that I had not hired him to do the job for me.  Even my children, as loyal as they were to me, had doubts until proven otherwise, but the damage was done.

If I hadn’t taken her there, she would still be alive.  Her family didn’t speak to me, her friends hated me, and my children had just stopped coming home.

So why was I back in Florence revisiting the place that caused me all that grief?

I wanted to know what happened.  I was retracing steps.  I had the police report, and I had the private investigator’s report retracing her steps from the moment she met Wyler to the moment they were shot in his hotel room.

The private investigator’s report read like I was caught up in a thriller novel.  It was, when I first read it, unbelievable.  I thought the fellow was making it all up, because he had painted both of them as completely unrecognisable characters.

I had told me one because no one would believe me.

It was one of the reasons I was on that bridge.

It was a message on my phone.  No caller ID.  Simple.  “Meet me on the bridge, same day, same time, this week. I have information about Alexandria.”

Thursday, 1 pm.

…

It had to be a sick joke.  She had been here, saw Tyler and did what she did.  Nothing anyone could tell me about it was going to change the fact she was dead, and was not coming back.

I was looking for closure, not a reopening of the wound, and yet, with a morbid sense of curiosity, I found myself on the bridge at the appointed time, waiting.

For whom.  Obviously, they knew me by sight, which in itself was scary.  Who was this person?  Was it a shake-down, information for money?  It wouldn’t surprise me.

“Mr Guillam?”

First surprise, it was a woman’s voice; second surprise, she knew me by sight, and when I turned to see who asked the question, third surprise, Alexandria’s oldest friend now estranged, for reasons she would never explain.

“Deborah.”

Deborah Willis, the girl who went through high school and college with her best friend and two others, though Alexandria never told me their names.  By the time she married me, she had moved away and never mentioned them.  Only Deborah had remained until something happened.

“Edward.  Long time, no see.”

“Alexandria never told me why; she just came home from one of your weekends and said she was done with you.”

“Let’s walk.”  I noticed she had been looking around, perhaps looking for someone.

We walked off the bridge and back the way I’d come.

I sensed she needed a moment to recover from the shock of meeting me again, and to gather her thoughts.

“Alexandria was always a piece of work,” she said, finally, with an edge to her tone.  “In school she was the leader of the pack, with us lesser mortals always clamouring to be in her group.  As you can imagine, we had a love-hate relationship.”

Alexandria was difficult at times, I had to admit, but her mother once told me that she needed treating with kid gloves from time to time.  It had a lot to do with self-image and confidence.

The thing is, I found she was rarely short of either, and that it was best just to yield to her will.  That popularity extended into adulthood, and I knew she liked to flirt but trusted she knew where the boundaries were.

It was sad when I discovered she did not.  Then it was a matter of what I was prepared to live with.  We had a comfortable life, though I sensed at times she was bored.  The trip around Europe was supposed to cure that.

Perhaps it was just an excuse for her to look for something else, something less boring.  I didn’t love her less.

“She was unique.”

She looked at me sideways.  “So, you know she and Tyler’s never stopped seeing each other even after you were married.”

The thought of that stopped me in my tracks.  She had never once mentioned him after declaring he had abandoned her.  Then, if I thought about it, it all sounded a little staged.  I was too blinded by my good fortune to see it, and so much easier for her to keep up the pretence

She realised I’d stopped and came back.

“You didn’t know.”

“I should have guessed.  The signs were all there when you know what to look for.”

“It’s why I never came to your wedding.  None of us did.  We knew it was hypocrisy.  It was also the beginning of the end.  None of us liked what she was doing.  Meeting him here was not a surprise, at least not the one she wanted you to believe.  They planned it.”

I wondered in that brief moment if Deborah was here to rub salt into a gaping wound.

“How do you know all of this?”

“I work for the same people Wyler does.  Different section, but I know everything there is to know about him.  Where he is, what he’s doing.  Which brought him to Florence.  I knew Alexandria was coming here, and why.  That performance at the bridge was Oscar-winning material.  She was, after all, the leading lady in all our school and college productions.”

A titbit of information she never shared.  As far as she was concerned, school had been a drudge, and she couldn’t wait to leave.

“What does Wyler do, you too for that matter, and why bother telling me all this?”

Perhaps she sensed the anger in my tone.  “Because it was Wyler who was killed, not her.  That hospital charade was set up by me so that we could get her back home.  She was close to death, but she didn’t die.”

Why did I get the feeling the next thing she was going to tell was something I didn’t want to know?

“Wyler was an intelligence gatherer.  He was good at being the hero, the one in the room that everyone noticed, the one in the room everyone wanted to tell their life story to, especially the ladies.”

“A spy?”

“No.  He just talked to specially targeted people, mostly women, and extracted information by any and all means necessary.”

“Was Alexandria a target?”  I’m not sure what I was supposed to think, but it was getting more difficult to believe any of this.

“No.  She was basically just some fool who thought she was in love with him when he just wanted to fuck her.  It’s what we argued about, and why she told me to go to hell.  It wasn’t worth burning her marriage over.  Anyway, I told the bosses he was compromised and why, and they told him to end it.  That was what he was supposed to do here.”

“When they met, it looked to me to be that last thing on his mind.  And, so the police told me, she was found shot in his hotel bed.”

“They both were.  He was the target.  He had a job in Siena, but he was sloppy and the people the woman worked for found out.  They sent an assassin.  The thing was, he hadn’t filed a report, and we needed it, so I assumed in those last moments before he did, he passed it on, or at the very least, where the information was.”

It was a story, and so far-fetched that it was almost believable.  They say truth is stranger than fiction, and I guess when it came to intelligence, the how always comes ahead of the why.

“Did he?”

“The short answer is yes.  The long answer requires more time and effort than I care to expend.”

“Did she tell you?”

“No.  She had leverage.  We need it; she knows it.”

“And you’re here because?”

“She’s somewhere in Florence.  She escaped once she realised what was going on, whether she thinks she’s in danger from us, or the others, I don’t know, and I’m assuming she has come to get the information and use it to make a bargain.”

And if all those TV shows I’d seen over the years were right, she didn’t have a bargaining chip, just a one-way ticket to the graveyard.  Once she handed it over, no more leverage.

Then there was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: what did all of this have to do with me?  Now I knew she had been cheating on me all this time; it made the loss less painful.  The fact he was using her, maybe that was karma.

“How does any of this involve me?”

“I think she’ll try to contact you.”

“How could she possibly know I’m here?”  Then it dawned on me.  The masters of intelligence gathering, she’d known exactly where every character would be on the chessboard. “You told her.”

“She asked.  We had to make sure they didn’t come after you and her children, just to be safe, so if you feel like people have been watching you, you weren’t imagining it.”

I hadn’t, but I wasn’t going to say that.

I shrugged.  “She’s not a spy, so I don’t expect much.”

“You’d be surprised.  I am at the level of cunning she has acquired in the last week, particularly in evading us.”

“I can’t help her.”

“I think she believes you can.”

“I won’t.”

“She’ll have a story, a convincing one.  She has spent years lying to everyone, even to herself.  We just want you to call us when she does approach you.  She is out of her depth.  I am too if you want the truth, and since this all went sideways, I just want out.  Unfortunately, this was deemed my mess, and I have to clean it up.  Just call me when she comes.  I’ll do the rest.”

“Which is?”

“As usual, resolve the problem by any or all means available.  Irrespective of the cost.”

She looked tired.

I just felt like a building had fallen on me.

When we parted, I didn’t think I’d see her again.  A pity, in another lifetime I liked her perhaps a little more than I should.  I’d always wondered what Deborah had seen in her.

…

The idea of confronting a dead person was not something I had been contemplating.  What it did was anger me, considering the damage it had done to me by all those who believed I killed her, children included.

To be honest, getting away, far away from all of them, had been necessary for my sanity, and I had seriously been contemplating never going back

While staying in Greve, I had been looking at cottages, and deciding where I might just stay and never go home.  If Alexandria was alive, the kids could have her; everyone could.

I trudged up the stairs to my hotel room, churning over every little detail that, if I had looked harder, would have pointed to the betrayal.  It annoyed me that I refused to look at them then, or believe something was wrong.

And then on the landing, a new sensation hit me.  The scent of her perfume.  It wasn’t for the first time, and I’d believed it to be my imagination wanting to believe she hadn’t gone.

I opened the door, and the scent lingered.  I stepped in and closed the door behind me. 

I could feel her presence.  She had that ability to affect me.  She had a way of enveloping you, making you feel like you were the only one in the room with her.

Except it was all a lie.  Everything about her was a lie, and I’d allowed myself to be caught up in it.

I took the two steps from the door to the entrance to the dining room and said, “I know you’re here somewhere, Alex.”

Then she stepped out, the old Alexandria, the one who could still take my breath away the same as she had twenty years ago. And probably always would.

“Of course you do.  My charming friend Debby has been in your ear.”

“Nearly five months and you didn’t think to tell me.”

“They wouldn’t let me.”

“You wouldn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.”

“A man gave his life for it.”

“The same man you’ve been screwing for years.”

OK.  That finally silenced her.  I wondered if she knew just how much Deborah would tell me.  Just enough also that I would do her bidding.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not, or you wouldn’t have done it.  It fits with my initial assessment, the silly fool who thought he’d won the lottery, only to discover that he was really the inconvenient excuse.  Twenty years, Alex.  You must feel so vastly superior.”

“You may never believe me, Edward, but I am sorry.  It was unforgivable, arrogant and selfish of me.  I did, do care for you.”

“Did. That had run its course by the time we got on the plane.  You made it perfectly clear you wanted to be anywhere but with me.”

“You changed,” she said, as if those two words would explain it all away.

“No.  I’m exactly the same as I was when I met you.  You changed.  Wyler changed you.  He had the lifestyle, the life you always saw you wanted.  It didn’t include kids or a husband.”

“I’m sure they don’t miss me.  I wasn’t much of a mother to them.  You did all of that.”

“They all think I killed you. Why do you think I’m here?  They never want to see me again.  No one back home does.”

“Interesting.”

Right then, had I given free rein to my emotions, I would have willingly throttled her.  How could I be tried for murder when she was already dead?  The fact I took two steps towards her, and she retreated, indicated she knew she had just hit a raw nerve.

“Look.  What happened didn’t go the way it was supposed to.  He told me it was the end, we couldn’t do it any more, and I convinced him to be together one last time.  Had I known he was a marked man and an assassin was coming to kill him, a small detail he forgot to mention, everything would have been fine.  I would have come back, admitted I was having an affair, and we would talk about it.  But what happened happened.  What are we going to do about it?”

“Nothing.  You’re going to leave, I’m not going home, there’s nothing and no one there I care for any more.  Why did you bother tracking me down when you knew what the result would be?”

“I thought you’d be more forgiving.”

“Perhaps if you hadn’t faked your death.”

“That wasn’t my fault.”

“And that’s the problem right there.  You are not going to take responsibility for your actions.  I’m surprised you haven’t blamed me for everything that went wrong.  All this time I blame myself, that if I hadn’t brought you here you’d still be alive…” I glared at her.  “Just get out of my sight.”

“I am sorry.”

“You don’t even know what that word means.”

I think she finally saw the futility in arguing with me.  She simply shrugged and left.

I called Deborah and told he she just left my room.

…

Life sometimes surprises you.

I didn’t go home, I told no one where I was going, and decided that, aside from my neighbours who called me that mysterious man who doesn’t say much, I kept to myself, tending my acre of olive trees somewhere in Tuscany.

It took me six slow and sometimes difficult months to repair the villa back to a livable condition, and ahead of me were the final touches.  At least now when it rained I didn’t have to have a shower in the dining room.

About three months after I last saw Alexandria, I started getting emails from my children, the first from each admitting they had made assumptions and were glad to finally hear how and where their mother died.

Deborah was true to her word when she said they would get the truth or as close to the truth as possible.  She sent me copies of her emails and their questions so I was across it.

The main thing was I was not to blame, and what happened I could not have stopped.  There was also the blunt truth that she was having an affair with a bad man and they had promised to rendezvous in Florence.  She even had an email trail that disparaged me, and suggested they would meet and live together, somewhere in Italy.

Someone in her organisation was a master storyteller.

The irony was not lost on them when they learned I was living in Tuscany, and wasn’t planning to come back.  They asked for forgiveness, and I said it would take time.  Maybe I would let them come and visit, but no one else could.  Children were all over the place with their feelings and loyalties; adults knew what they were doing.

None deserved or would ever get my forgiveness.

Then, at the end of summer, eight months had passed, and it had been raining, cooling the hot August day, leaving it cool and just perfect.

Two cars, one with carabinieri on the side, stopped outside my house.

I knew who the person was in the second car, and watched the officer get out of the first car, go back to the other car, open the door and help a woman get out of the passenger’s side.  The officer was the same woman officer who had told me Alexandria was dead.

The drivers of the two cars got out and stood by their vehicles.  One was Deborah.

It meant that the procedures they used on Alexandria had worked. 

There had been one more conversation with Deborah and Alexandria a week after she had been captured outside my hotel.  There, Alexandria discovered she had two choices: one to be locked up in an isolated prison that no one had ever escaped from and would never leave, or she submitted to a memory erasure procedure, and if it worked, would be returned to me.

To me it sounded awful.  And illegal.  But it wasn’t my idea.  I argued against having it, because even in jail she would know who she was.

She said she had no choice.  Either way, in most respects she was dead, so what did it matter?  She signed the forms, and said she would see me again; and this time she would be different.

I wasn’t holding my breath.

After six months, I had all but given up expecting anything.  I had heard nothing, and I didn’t know where or who I was to ask.

Perhaps it had worked.

The woman I saw walking beside the officer was looking around, smiling, and I had to say she looked very little like the woman in my hotel room eight months ago.  She was like the girl I first met nearly twenty-one years ago, before the obsession with the gym and losing weight.  Her hair colour was golden, long, and out so that the breeze lifted wisps into her face, causing her to brush it aside.

She was in full summer mode, happy, confident, and she could still take my breath away.

I opened the door.  The officer acted as if she didn’t know me.

“Mr Walters?”

“Yes?”

“As discussed yesterday, we have brought your wife home.  She has slight memory loss, but the doctors agree it will return eventually.  She remembers you, which is, I believe, a good thing.”

She stood patiently beside the officer.  Her eyes registered recognition.  Deborah said she had her memory retrained to the point where she knew she was married to me, that we had once lived in another country and that we had moved here for her health.  And to recover from a very bad accident, which was the reason for her memory loss.  Other than that, she was perfectly well.

She also had a new name and an Italian heritage.  She had always been able to speak Italian fluently, as well as several other European languages.  That hadn’t changed.

“Alessandria.”

“Gordon.  I was surprised when they came yesterday to tell me I could come home.  You’ve done the place up.  I guess all that nagging finally worked out.”

I took her outstretched hand and guided her inside.  The office wasn’t staying.  Through the windows I saw Deborah’s wave before getting back in her car.  She would come back in a week to see how Alessandria was managing.

Then she gave me a hug.  In my ear she whispered, “You have no idea how glad I am to be home.”

“You have no idea how glad I am you are home.”

Now alone with her, I was not quite sure what to do next.  I knew she was Alexandria, but she didn’t look like her; they had made changes so she would not be too recognisable.  And it felt like I could not assume that everything would be marital bliss instantly.  She would have to find her way and get comfortable.

She kissed me on the cheek, hugged me, then went into the bedroom, checking if everything was there.  Several large cases had arrived the day before with her belongings, and I’d set them out like she had never been away.  Everything of Alexandria’s was there, including her favourite perfume.

She sat on the bed and smiled, then a tear ran down her cheek.  Happy, sad, glad, upset?

She patted the bed beside her, and I sat.

“We start again.  I think I was not too good a wife before; this I feel, not remember.  Do not tell me about previous life; we shall create a new one.”

“Do you feel comfortable here?”

“Why should I not?  We were, before the accident, embarking on a second honeymoon.  Let it be so, and perhaps let it not end.  Champagne?”

“Of course.”  I gently wiped the tears away and went out to get the bottle waiting in the fridge.

It was more than I expected, or hoped for.  I said a silent prayer of thanks, then took two glasses and the bottle in an ice bucket back to the room.

The computer had restarted, and there was a Zoom call, which, before I could stop her, she answered. 

It was Alexandria and Edward, our children, each named after us because Alexandria thought it was the thing to do.  I thought it was odd.

“Dad.” I could hear Edward before I could see him.  “Dad, you never told us Alessandria was home from the hospital.”

She was sitting in front of the screen, looking a little confused.  I had hoped to ease her into the fact she was a stepmother, and that they had one.

It seemed Deborah had woven a story for them.

“Just now, Ed, and she’s a little tired from the trip.  Can we do this tomorrow?”

“No.”  She said.  “I am alright.  I have been waiting and wanting to meet you, and hope that you will accept me not as a replacement but a friend if and when you need one.  You could come and stay for a while.  I would love to show you my country.”

“That’s what we called for.”  Alexandria had sat down beside Edward.  It was not hard to see her mother in the daughter.  “We thought we could visit, see a little of Italy, spend some time repairing bridges.”

“Of course.  When?”

“We arrived in Florence in two days.  Grandma arranged it.  She was coming with us, but Granddad got sick and is in hospital.  It will be just us, on our best behaviour.  OK.  Got to go.  See you then.”

The screen went blank.

I looked at Allessandria.  “Wow,” she said.  “They are everything you said they were, even if they made a mistake in blaming you for their mother’s death.  I guess children are like that.  Alexandria looks like her mother, doesn’t she?”

I looked at her, trying to tell if there was a hidden meaning in her tone.  Perhaps I worried too much.

“She does.  It hurts sometimes, but you managed to assuage that pain.  In more ways than one.”

“Is that why you picked me?  The name.  You know it’s the Italian version of it.”

“Perhaps in my grief it crossed my mind, but not specifically.  I simply fell in love with you the first time I saw you, and it only gets stronger every time I see you.  Now.  Champagne.  Time to celebrate your return.”

…

©  Charles Heath  2026