Chapter One Guinevere #2
Some of my friends didn’t understand my often blind love for and loyalty to him, but they didn’t know what it was like to be so sick as a child you might die.
To go to bed every night wondering if this was the time you wouldn’t wake.
To have that fear be such an elemental part of your life and then to trust the man who told you each and every one of those nights that he would see you in the morning.
That he would be there no matter what, and then he was.
Even though he was an important man with a booming financial firm, he never missed a doctor’s appointment. Every time I woke up from surgery, he was there beside my bed, smiling at me. Every time I was sick and aching, he was there to hold me, to distract me. My human embodiment of hope.
I knew how lucky I was to have a father like him, and until recently I’d never thought to take it for granted. If he’d asked me to crawl over glass, I might have. That was how much I trusted him. That was how infrequently he’d let me down.
The only thing we had ever disagreed on was Italy.
His homeland and the seat of his hatred.
My ancestral country and the setting of my lifelong dreams.
Gemma had always encouraged me to visit.
Fuck him, she’d say in that flippant, slightly cruel way she had of putting down any and all authority figures. If he loves you, he won’t stop you from doing what you’ve always dreamed of doing.
But it was easy for her to say.
As the sick sister, I’d been given more attention through necessity, but they made it up to Gemma by giving her whatever she asked for. Trips around the world, designer bags, a Porsche when she turned sixteen.
We could have been raised by different parents, that was how disparate our upbringings had been.
Her words lingered, though.
Long after she moved to Albania for her year abroad.
And then she sent me that last email before she died.
Listen to me, Jinx, I know what I’m talking about.
You don’t owe Dad and Mom anything. It’s your life, and you’ve fought to stay on this earth to live it.
You owe it to yourself to go to Italy. I hope you find answers there like I have here.
I never could have known what I would find when I started looking into who I truly am.
Don’t let Dad’s lies keep you from your truth.
I won’t let him keep me from mine anymore.
Be brave and bold, little sister. I hope when we see each other again, we are both very different people.
It seemed too much like the hand of fate to receive a message like that from Gemma just a handful of days before she died of a heart attack.
So I’d taken it to heart despite the god-awful feeling of lying to my parents and disobeying the strictest order they’d ever set for me.
Do not set foot in Italy.
Even now, after everything that had happened, the lies and heartbreak, I couldn’t say I regretted it. My summer in Tuscany had changed me for the better.
Raffa had called me his fawn, his cerbiatta, but I felt like a stag now. Something with wariness and horns, something that wasn’t afraid to gouge if threatened.
I knew now what I hadn’t before.
There were real monsters in the world, and the most dangerous of them all had a face like an angel’s.
“No rest for the weary,” I responded finally, with a little shrug as I reached into the open bag on the seat beside me for another pencil.
He studied me for a moment, something like fond amusement warring with frustration in those brown eyes that were so similar to my own. “You always preferred to do things longhand. Unusual for kids today.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m a kid anymore,” I said mildly, my attention on the numbers set out before me instead of on my father.
The sight of him hurt me. Knowing he was there but not here, not present for me the way he always had been before.
It might have hurt less if I’d still had Raffa, but losing the only two men I’d ever loved in one fell swoop had carved me up from the inside out and left me hollow.
“No,” he mused with a weary sigh, moving into the conference room to brace his hands on the back of one of the empty seats.
The light hit his face full on, highlighting the tired brackets beside his eyes and mouth.
He’d always been a handsome man, but right then, he seemed like a faded photograph of someone from a long time ago.
“But you won’t tell me what happened this summer to take the bloom off the rose. ”
I snorted softly, dropping the pretense of work to level him with an assessing look. “I’ve told you. When you are ready to tell me about why you left Italy, I’ll tell you what happened in Firenze.”
He flinched slightly at the name of the city, a tic he couldn’t curb.
Curiosity burned in me so brightly I couldn’t believe I’d ever been able to contain it.
I’d always wondered about what bridges he must have burned in leaving his family and nation behind and moving to America, but I’d respected him too much to press.
No, maybe that wasn’t quite it.
I hadn’t known enough about the world to question if that past was anything more than uncomfortable. If it was dark and full of secrets that could, years later, affect me.
Now that I did, I refused to settle for silence.
And the only trump card I had to play was my own Italian history.
Dad glowered at me.
Once, it would have worked, but I’d fallen in love with a man whose glares could skin the hide off a rhino, so I only blinked in response.
“Damn it, Guinevere,” he growled, slipping the chair out so he could sink into it, hands going to his hair and mussing it for the first time all day. “I thought when we left your teenage years behind that we’d remained unscathed by this kind of rebellion from you. We had enough of it from Gemma.”
“Blind obedience isn’t something you should be proud of,” I countered, wincing at my own past naivete.
“You knew how much I wanted to go to Italy. How much it meant to me. How I dreamed of it during those long stays at the hospital.” Despite myself, tears clogged my throat, turning my voice to ash.
“You knew, and you never gave me any reason or backstory. You just forbade me like an antiquated king with a princess in a fairy tale.”
“You should have respected me enough to take my word for it,” he said gruffly, hands white knuckled where they were clasped over the table.
“You should have respected me enough to tell me the truth,” I retorted, scalding tears racing down my cheeks.
This was the crux of the issue with both the men in my life.
How could they respect me—love me—if they didn’t trust me with the truth?
Vera, Raffa had called me. Truth in Italian.
Yet he had offered me none of his own honesty.
He might have been gone from my life forever, but my father was not. There was still hope there. I just needed him to explain himself so I could explain myself to him and we could finally reach some kind of understanding.
“Have you ever considered not telling you the truth was to keep you safe?” Dad demanded, slamming a palm flat to the table as he leaned across it.
“Did you ever consider I would cut out my own heart before putting you in harm’s way and that keeping you from that blood-soaked country was the least I could do to keep you safe? I left for a reason, Guinevere.”
“And I went for my own reasons,” I replied, suddenly exhausted by the fruitlessness of this conversation. An imitation of the one we’d had every week since I came home in August. “Until we can be honest with each other, we can’t fix this rift between us. Are you happy with the way things are?”
The question was bloody, a raw hunk of flesh I carved out of myself to offer to him.
Do you see the way I bleed because of this? I tried to convey. Do you see the way I ache to make things right?
But Dad only stared at me, a vein throbbing in his forehead.
“I love you, Dad,” I said after a long moment of silence. “But if I learned anything this summer, it’s that I have to love myself more than anyone else if I want to be healthy and happy. And I refuse to pretend I’m okay with you keeping secrets from me that affect my own life.”
“We can fix this,” he said with fervor, opening his hand to me even though I was too far away to take it.
“Just put my past to rest, where it has lain buried for years, and look to the future with me. I-I can’t say I will forgive you easily for going to that place behind my back, but you’re home now, and if you promise not to go back again, we can recover. ”
A bitter laugh coughed up my throat.
Because I could promise that, really.
It wasn’t like there was anything for me left in Italy but broken promises and shattered dreams.
So why was it impossible to make that oath?
The idea of never returning was too final, ripping out the last roots of the love that had seeded, grown, and flourished in Tuscany.
It would eliminate the faint whisper of “what if” that haunted me in the darkest hours of the night, when I couldn’t sleep for the memories.
Despite everything, I could not make that oath.
The idea of never seeing Raffa again stabbed through me like a cold blade, even though I knew it was one of my own making. I had decided to leave him.
But, a small voice in my head murmured, he didn’t come after you. He hasn’t contacted you at all since you’ve been gone.
Despite that, I couldn’t bring myself to utter the words to repair my relationship with my father and risk permanently deleting all hope of Raffa from my heart.
“I won’t do that,” I said finally. “That shouldn’t be what this hinges on.
If I go again—which I do not intend to do at all right now—then I’ll give you the courtesy and respect of telling you.
But I won’t make that promise. It’s my life, and I have to be able to do as I please.
Maybe you can’t understand that, but after being sick and sheltered for so long, I need this independence.
Even though what happened in Tuscany changed me, it wasn’t for the worse.
I’m stronger now. And part of being strong means assuming responsibility for myself instead of hiding behind my parents. Even when I love them.”
Dad stared at me, throat working as he swallowed convulsively. When he spoke, he stared at his open palms as if they held the secrets to the universe. “I should have realized before this.”
“Realized what?”
His gaze snapped to mine, dark eyes the same shape as my own and filled with fire. “That you are too much like me to understand how to put aside your pride and make the right decision.”
Without waiting for a reply, he pushed out of the chair and stalked out of the conference room. I watched with tears drying tight on my skin as he went to his corner office and then reemerged a moment later in his coat and scarf, with his briefcase.
He did not spare me a look as he left the offices.
The only thing that remained in his wake was the cold, dark office and the pile of numbers I had been trying to drown myself in. Left with nothing else to do, I dove right back in and hoped the clarity of mathematics would clear my tumultuous soul.