It took her a long time to get over the feelings of betrayal which had completely swamped her when Demetria had announced that her husband had believed her to have fled with a lover. For one, she was not that kind of person, and for another, she had never given him a single opportunity for him to have misunderstood her.
As she ran along the fortified ring of walls around Lucca, she enjoyed the peaceful surroundings pumping in hungrily deep bouts of fresh air in her lungs. She loved the place as it was near to her parents’ house and she had been running on those tracks since a teenager.
For once in the past nine days, she had finally allowed Velia, her babysitter alone with Alban. She had been fighting a lost battle when she had refused the help of a nanny because Signora Mara had been a
