Chapter Two #3
As he continued his expounding, Catarina found herself thinking about her mother.
How would her father’s ideas about marriage have played out if Maria Nordland had lived?
Even before her mother’s death, her father’s overprotective tendencies had been stifling at times.
That he loved Catarina had never been in doubt, but he had never quite figured out what to do with her, swinging wildly between indulgent and strict.
Her mother had protected her from her father’s efforts to raise the society girl that he had always assumed someone of their station would become.
In that path, Catarina had no interest. She had only sporadically attended the all-girls boarding school, tucked away in the Italian Alps, staying just long enough to learn languages and anything of interest before she took off to be by her mother’s side for their next adventures.
A flurry of tutors had ensured she’d passed all her exams, but many of the finishing school lessons this academy prided itself on were lost on Catarina.
After eighteen, she had resisted her father’s more pressing calls for an appropriate future and assumed the position of her mother’s full-time travel companion.
Her life might have glided on like that for years, but her mother’s stage-four breast cancer diagnosis five years ago had changed everything.
From that day on, Catarina’s life had been turned upside down.
Her mother had been her only real friend, and when they traveled, it was as if the two of them had existed in their own little world.
At the age when she might have entertained the idea of university or some small stretch of independence, she grew even more attached to her mother.
At every single one of those last performances, she and her father had sat, side by side, in tears, bonded by their mutual love and impending loss.
During those last months, the world had closed.
It was then that her mother’s last wishes were uttered, the wishes that had haunted both Catarina and her father since that day.
She had eavesdropped outside the heavy door to her parents’ bedroom, unwilling to miss a moment of what was left of her mother’s voice.
“Protect her,” her mother had said to her father. Her mother’s voice had been so soft, so weak, so unlike the larger-than-life music that had shaped Catarina’s world. “She will be lonely when I am gone. Make sure that she is protected for the rest of her life.”
If Catarina hadn’t eavesdropped that day, she never would have understood what was behind her father’s clumsy attempts to push her in one direction, then the other.
But when he announced the plan for her marriage across the heavy dinner table, surrounded by portraits of generations of the d’Avalos family, a rare smile had teased at her father’s lips.
He had found his solution, the way to fulfill his promise to his beloved wife, and that decision was final.
Her mother would have been horrified. This was decidedly not what Maria Nordland had meant, and yet to point out that Catarina knew her mother’s intentions better than he did would devastate him.
So she’d said nothing. Not yet. Not until she got her head around a solution that would untangle the mess that was winding its way around her life.
Since the day her father had announced the marriage proposal, Catarina had buried herself in her books and traveled, trying desperately not to think about this rapidly approaching future.
She’d visited her mother’s family in Oslo, just to hear them speak the secret language she and her mother had shared.
But her cousins’ homes were haunted by her mother’s ghost, so she’d left them and retreated to the towering place her father had built for her mother, with its mix of Scandinavian sensibilities and an Italian flair for luxury.
It was perched on the mountains that rose up from the deep blue Norwegian fjords, dramatic and immovable.
As she listened now to her father wax prosaic over the future that Massimo would bring her, Catarina found herself thinking once again about that place.
It was her and her mother’s retreat from the world, the place that truly felt like home.
It felt like freedom. Catarina alone had inherited it, as her father never had any interest in the stark beauty of his wife’s home country.
As she nodded at her father’s long soliloquies, an answer to her predicament came to her, an answer that would free her from the vise that seemed to be tightening around her chest.
Late that night, long after her father had disappeared down the hallway of the master suite, Catarina packed her bags full of soft wools and fleeces and slipped out of the house.
She alerted the pilot of their family’s jet that she needed to make a quick trip to Norway, confident that her years of impromptu trips with her mother would mean the crew wouldn’t suspect anything out of the ordinary.
Definitely not something that her father should be alerted of.
Catarina wasn’t running away; at least that was what she told herself on the taxi ride to the airport.
She was simply making some space to think.
Her father would find her, of course, but with any luck it would take a few days for him to catch up.
Knowing her father and his aversion to snow, he was more likely to send someone else to collect his daughter.
By then, she would have a plan, because as much as she wanted to please her father, her mother’s voice would always speak louder.
“Someday, my little songbird, you must fly on your own.” The words still rang in her head.
Maybe this wasn’t exactly the sort of flight her mother had had in mind, but it was only now that Catarina fully understood why her mother had spoken these words, now that a marriage to Massimo Carandini threatened to take this possibility away.
Catarina had always been a quiet, obedient daughter for her father, but at her core, she was her mother’s child. Tomorrow morning, when he found himself alone at the breakfast table, he would be reminded of that fact.