Chapter Six #3
Luca had offered to bring Filomena to a clinic in Milan, where he could visit more often, but she didn’t want to move north. She had friends here and in Palermo who came to see her regularly. Soon she would be well enough to return to her suite in his villa, so she wanted to be here in Catania.
Thanks to Nonna’s inquisitiveness, he learned more about Jade while they ate.
She had spent her school years in the north of England, taken her degree in social sciences and once worked for a florist. Jade promised to bring an arrangement of cuttings from Nonna’s garden the next time they came.
Their baby was due at the end of November.
“What a lovely person,” Jade said when they were in the car again. She studied the silver pendant on a long chain that Filomena had put on her. Its tiny chime was intended to bring the protection of angels to her and the baby. “I can see why you were anxious to get back to her that night.”
The night of the party seemed like a lifetime ago, but the lethal cut of fear was fresh as he recalled getting the news of her stroke. He’d been plunged into the icy helplessness of loss. The feeling that his angel, the one who had spurred him to be the best man he could be, was leaving him.
He realized Jade was watching him.
“She is very precious to me,” he agreed belatedly.
“I’ve gathered that she raised you. Can I ask why? I don’t mean to pry. If it’s too painful—”
“It’s been twenty years.” He brushed over the fact that there were moments when his grief was as deep and wide and penetrating as that terrible night.
“My sister had a dance recital. I wanted to stay home and play calcio with my friends. Football. Soccer,” he clarified. “I argued with my father about it.”
Luca paused here because that was a lie, one that he had repeated often enough to believe it himself, but it bothered him to be dishonest to Jade. He couldn’t tell her the truth, though. It wouldn’t be safe for her.
She was watching him with a small wrinkle in her brow, eyes soft as a bed of moss. Her hand reached out to cover his where it rested on his thigh.
He moved his hand from beneath hers, scorched. Don’t. I don’t deserve that.
Some of the warmth in her expression bled away.
“He told me I didn’t understand what it means to be a family,” he continued flatly, averting his gaze from the injury in hers.
“That we needed to support each other. I said he wasn’t supporting my desire to become a professional athlete and was only concerned about my sister’s dance career.
” More lies told by rote. “He might have cuffed me for my insolence, but Nonna overheard us. She had moved in with us after my grandfather died. She said she would keep me at home with her, told my father to cool off, that we could talk later. That night, on their way home, they were in a crash.”
They’d been forced off the road and Luca couldn’t think of it without feeling a scream rise in his throat while his heart writhed with the terror they all must have felt.
“I’m so sorry, Luca,” Jade whispered.
“It was senseless,” he said curtly.
So senseless. Especially once his grandmother told him the truth. Luca had fought with his father because he’d thought Severo had been driven by greed. Acquisitiveness. I’m ashamed to call you my father.
But it had been something else entirely.
“It haunts me that I was supposed to be in the car with them.” That was the bald truth. “I’m glad I survived to look after my grandmother, but there’s a voice inside me that questions whether I deserve to have a family, since I was so willing to abandon mine that night.”
“You were a child,” Jade reminded him compassionately.
“The question is still there. It was reinforced when I learned that Trieste’s baby wasn’t mine. It made me wonder if I was meant to be a father.”
You would have been sure last time if you’d been sure about the woman. He kept turning Nonna’s words over in his mind, uncomfortable with what she could have meant. That he hadn’t wanted to be a father? Not enough to accept a child he hadn’t conceived?
There was a shred of truth in that, since he wasn’t sure he wanted to become the kind of man his father had been. A man who would do anything, even commit crimes, for the people he loved.
“You’re feeling ambivalent about this baby?
Is that what you’re saying?” Jade asked with a protective hand against her navel.
“Because I can understand that, Luca, but don’t…
” Her expression flexed with anguish. “That kind of indifference is damaging. I won’t subject my baby to it.
If you don’t think you can love our baby with a full and open heart, we can’t do this. ”
He heard the quaver in her voice and saw the pulse in her throat flutter anxiously.
“Quit offering me a way out. I’m not a coward.
” Every time she tried to distance herself, he had an urge to physically grasp her and pull her close.
“There’s no doubt in me that I will love our child.
” The truth in his words struck particularly hard against the steely shell he’d formed around his soul, sending fissures of vulnerability through it.
“But there’s still that question in my mind around whether I deserve to be a father. ”
And how he would behave once he became one.