“A research trip, señora,” was the unhelpful answer.
“There you are. She’ll turn up when she’s finished her fieldwork,” La Reina said.
“Where did she go? When is she coming back?” Angelo asked the assistant.
“I’m sorry. I don’t have that information, señor. She books her own travel.”
Frustrated, he returned to her home and went into her office to see if he could figure out where she’d gone. Why had she left without telling anyone where she was going? It didn’t portend well and left a sick knot in his gut.
It made him think she really was fine with ending their marriage so she could go back to the life she’d led before.
He had a quick peek at her social media profiles, half thinking he would approach some of the people he’d met during their goodwill tour before their wedding. He quickly realized none of them were on there. Her friend list consisted of her immediate family and her privacy settings were locked down. Her only public content was the photographs he’d once thought proved she lived a globe-trotting life in exotic locations.
Now he knew her better, which cast a fresh light on the remoteness in her snapshots. While they’d been in Australia, he’d taken several photos of her, and she’d said, “I’m usually alone and I hate taking selfies so I’m never in my photos.”
Until this moment, he hadn’t heard the deep loneliness in that statement. Now he saw it clearly in the beautiful places she visited without having anyone with her to share her experience.
He looked more closely at her home office. Every wall was covered in bookshelves. Three of the nonfiction titles were written by her—where the hell had those come from? Why had she never mentioned that she understood economics well enough to write investment strategies for non-professionals?
There were dozens of textbooks on a range of subjects, a handful of self-help tomes on public speaking and networking, two shelves of dog-eared romance novels and a shelf stuffed to the gills with journals. They were all neatly labeled with dates.
He took one out at random and saw nothing but numbers and dates and Latin names. So much information gathered and filtered through that sharp brain of hers, distilled and shared on her terms.
Because she found human interactions so difficult? Or because she had no one with whom to share her discoveries?
His heart truly began to ache, then. She had admitted to feeling lonely most of her life. He’d seen how she struggled to connect. All this time, he’d feared that she would never feel anything genuine toward him when maybe all he’d had to do was let her know how much she meant to him. How much he loved her.
He loved her and missed her and not knowing where she’d gone was torture.
But finding her turned out to be as simple as checking their joint credit card statement. The Faroe Islands. Where the hell was that?
He called his pilot and was soon headed in the direction of Iceland.
* * *
Over a lifetime of nursing loneliness and scorn, Pia had discovered there was a strangely comforting symmetry in being physically miserable when she was emotionally miserable.
There was also something reassuring in returning to familiar routines. She set her trusty, well-worn, gel cushion on a suitable rock, propped her journal on her crooked knee while balancing an umbrella with the same hand and used her free hand to begin making notes on the colony of seals below her.
The wind blew the rain into her face and onto her page, but that was why she wore a rubber coat and used pencil instead of ink. The damp sank into her bones, but she had brought a cushion and a thermos of hot tea as consolation. The man she loved would never love her, but that was why she was here. Even forsaken souls could be useful to humanity if they didn’t mind a little tedium and isolation.
The bark of the seals and rush of the waves drowned out the sound of footsteps until the boots appeared in her peripheral vision.
She gasped and looked up, telling herself it was a local who had tramped out to ask her what she was doing, but she already knew it was Angelo. Her body knew it before her eyes confirmed it.
He scanned the small harbor below, but looked at her as she tilted the umbrella back so she could see him. His brows pulled into a frown.
“What are you doing?”
“Working.”
“I thought you wanted to set up a pregnancy study?”
She glanced down, almost saying that what she studied only mattered to her and she was beginning to think she didn’t matter to anyone.
She slanted the umbrella over herself again. “I told you I like to collect data when I need to think.”
“You could have told me where you were going.”