Chapter Fourteen #3
His mother’s eyes were huge. She stared at him for several seconds before she stood tremulously and paced towards the piano, pressing a finger to the ivory keys without making a sound.
‘That fool of a man,’ she muttered, shaking her head. For the second time that afternoon, he watched as a woman’s face became slippery with tears.
‘Would you have preferred he deny it?’
She spun around to face him then, arms wrapped around her slender frame. ‘Aristotle, Stavros was your father.’
He should have been used to the feeling of the earth tilting wildly beneath him, but he wasn’t yet.
‘What?’
She lifted a hand and fidgeted with the necklace she wore. He’d noticed, but never really comprehended, that she’d threaded her engagement ring around it—the one given to her by Stavros.
She pressed a hand to the piano, this time obviously for support.
Aristotle stood very, very still.
‘You know I had a twin sister, darling?’
He frowned, unsure of where this was going, but nodding.
‘She passed away, about a year before you were born. It was a very, very bad time in my life. She and I were soulmates, in so many ways. She was my other half. I didn’t cope well with her loss.
At the same time, your father and I had been struggling with fertility issues for almost two years.
Honestly, I’ve never been in such a dark place. ’
His frown deepened. He could easily believe that. His mother was nothing if not optimistic. She had a never-ending supply of practical, cheery advice for any situation.
‘I ran away.’
He stared at her.
‘I don’t mean literally. I mean that I ran from my life. I thought if I went somewhere else, became someone else, I could escape the grief.’ Her lips twisted in a hollow grimace. ‘It didn’t work.’
He nodded, clearing his throat, not sure what he could say. It didn’t matter, anyway. His mother was unburdening herself.
‘I didn’t realise it, but in leaving your father, I put him through the worst time of his life, too.
He was broken, Ari. Completely destroyed.
I’d been carrying so much pain over not being able to conceive, I didn’t realise that he had been experiencing the same thing.
He was always so strong—so incredibly strong.
He didn’t let himself show his grief—he thought he had to support me. ’
It was impossible not to hear this without feeling an ache, deep in his gut, for these people who’d raised him.
‘In the time we were separated, he met someone else. It wasn’t serious—they only saw each other a few nights. He was simply looking to forget, too. She fell pregnant, but didn’t tell him. The first we knew about you was a few weeks after you were born.’
Aristotle felt as though he could barely breathe.
‘She had been in a bad car accident. She almost died, but they were able to bring her into the hospital and keep her in a coma long enough to deliver you. We might still never have known, except she’d been preparing documents with a lawyer, and in those documents she’d specified your father’s name as your next of kin, without identifying his paternity.
But by the time we were notified, her name alone was on the birth certificate.
To make you ours legally, we had to adopt you.
Besides, your father didn’t want to risk anyone else learning what he’d done. ’
Aristotle’s chest filled with the strength of his emotions. ‘Why didn’t he tell me any of this?’
‘I suppose to protect me,’ she said, but with evident irritation.
‘I took it very hard, that I could not conceive. And yet, from the first moment I held you, I made you—and your poor late mother—a promise. There was no one else, Ari. She had no family, no siblings, no one to step in. So I swore I would love you with every fibre of my being. I would love you so utterly and completely as though you were my own, almost until you were sick of me.’ Then she sobbed.
‘My darling, I did. I have. I have held you in my heart, giving you all of the space there, because that is what you deserve.’ She crossed to him then, putting her hands around his arms. ‘Can you really say you have any shadow of a doubt as to how much I adore you?’
He closed his eyes on a growing wave of guilt. A feeling that he had spent all the time since he was fifteen pulling away from his parents—who had loved him, just as she said.
‘He should have told me,’ Aristotle said in a choked voice.
‘Yes. But he wanted to protect me, you see. He loved me, from the first moment we met until his last breath, as I loved him. I know how hard you found it that I married again so quickly afterwards, but had it not been for the way your father stretched my heart, I don’t know if I could ever have loved another man.
’ She sighed, shaking her head, her perceptive grey eyes lancing him thoughtfully.
‘He should never have let you suffer like this though, all to spare my feelings. Only he loved me so much, every day we had together. Sadly, though, my darling, love can sometimes make you really, really stupid.’