Chapter Twelve
Mari Roselli had slipped into the parlor at the Lovelock Inn on Valentine Key quietly and without fanfare, feeling like she was daring to enter the lion’s den—perhaps a more appropriate phrase would be the lionesses’ den—to hear the last will and testament of her biological father, Horatio Lovelock.
No one had seemed to notice her until she remained behind in the room after all the non-family attendees shuffled out so the private portion of the will reading could commence.
She’d gotten several curious looks, but no one threw her out. That gave her a bit of hope in this gambit. Still, Mari wasn’t sure she should have a part in this at all. But she had traveled all the way here, so she might as well.
Initially, Mari had wanted to discover all she could about her family before she went on her merry way. Maybe if all went well, she’d reconsider her plans to leave and stick around for a while, at least in the short term.
She had learned only quite recently about the extent of the Lovelock family and all the siblings she had. Mari felt a little guilty that she had not looked for them sooner. There were reasons, of course—good reasons, to her mind—as to why she had dismissed any part of her father and the Lovelock family quite a long time ago.
The missive she had received from her father’s lawyer, Miles Lang, had insisted rather forcefully that she show up. Now that she was here, the secret of her existence would be out of the bag, front and center for all to see, whether they liked it or not. And they probably wouldn’t like it. That’s what she expected, in any case.
It was also something she dreaded, but it didn’t keep her from showing up. Curiosity was obviously more persuasive than anything as to why she was here.
She wanted to find out what her sisters were like. Mari had quite a few preconceived notions about how she would be treated. At best, she could expect indifference; at worst, to be vilified and run out of town on a rail by a torch-wielding crowd because they didn’t want to share any of their inherited wealth.
Did they even have a railway line on Valentine Key? That was unclear. What was clear was that she had a fanciful imagination.
Sometime during the reading, Miles Lang would announce her name as one of Horatio Lovelock’s daughters. Miles had indicated that much in his letter urging her to be here today.
Just like the sound of the bell that could never be unheard, once her siblings found out about her, they would know it forevermore.
Mari tried to think of how she would react in the same situation, but had no frame of reference whatsoever for that instance. She had lived her entire life as an only child with no family. After her mother passed away almost twenty years ago, she’d lived a rather solitary life. Her father was a man she had only had contact with twice. He was a stranger, as far as she was concerned.
The first time she met Horatio Lovelock, she’d been infant, so maybe that didn’t count. The second time was after her mother, Francesca Roselli, died. After she was all alone in the world and shaken to her bones by the realization that the only person who was truly in her life was gone forever. It was months after that, when she notified him of Francesca’s death.
That was when she’d finally discovered the name of the man who’d sired her. Francesca had not lied, exactly, but she’d certainly stretched the truth into an unidentifiable mess. Still, she’d never blamed her mother for taking that secret to her grave. She’d had her reasons, and Mari would never dispute them or think badly of her mother for her decisions.
Mari discovered a secret bank account in her mother’s name that became hers upon Francesca’s death. The account had been opened not long after Mari had been born.
She also found a letter from her mother that explained the existence of the bank account, the identity of Mari’s father and the story of how Francesca had met Horatio Lovelock, resulting in Mari’s birth.
Until Mari read that letter, she’d known very little about the man who’d fathered her. During her lifetime, Francesca had been unbelievably tight-lipped about it. It was as if the information pained her to reveal.
Mari had thought her mother grieved the death of her nameless father, but that was not the case at all. Her mother had probably been trying to protect her only child from the kind of rich, entitled life she was certain her other sisters must have lived.
A completely different life than she’d lived, which, although it had been filled with love, had not had very much in the way of riches. Somehow, they’d always had enough. Now, of course, she realized her mother must have dipped into the bank account her father had provided whenever things got tight.
Mari had thought her mother had found the funds they needed from a life insurance policy received after her father, the non-existent Mr. Roselli, passed on. Or that her mother had a stash of cash hidden away for emergencies. Well, she did, thanks to Horatio Lovelock, absentee father. It had come in handy when Mari had been young.
When Mari was in middle school, she’d broached the subject of her father, asking her mother who he was and why he wasn’t with them. Family genealogy had come up in one of her classes and some of her classmates had bragged about being able to trace their ancestry to the very ships that brought their families to the country, during the founding of the nation.
Mari had known nothing about who her father was, let alone any family history about him.
Even for a school project, Francesca hadn’t wanted to discuss it. Based on the date of the letter Mari found after her mother’s death, that was when Francesca decided to write a letter to her daughter and tell her at least the story of how she came to be.
Mari knew her mother had fallen out with her own parents before Mari was born. That was another subject her mother never wanted to talk about, and that was eventually okay with Mari. She and her mother had been very close all her life and that was the way Francesca liked it.
She told Mari over and over again how much she liked that it had been just the two of them against the world. Mari had enjoyed that for a long time, but now she wished she had done things differently, tried to find out more from her mother about her estranged family on her father’s side.
A family she hadn’t even been aware of and a father whom she’d never known about until she’d become an adult. Not even knowing who he was until her mother died tragically and far too young. When anyone found out that her mother had died young, they assumed it was some sort of cancer, but that wasn’t true.
She had been killed by a heart defect she’d unknowingly carried around with her since birth. It had started gradually. At first, her mother just seemed tired, especially at the end of the day. Then she started going to bed earlier and eventually added an afternoon nap to her day.
The doctors discovered her heart condition when her health worsened to the point she couldn’t even walk across the room without having to stop and take a break. Adding even more terrible news, because of her poor heart and how it had never operated at peak efficiency, Francesca’s pulmonary system had been so damaged there was no coming back from it.
The words “living on borrowed time” came up often in conjunction with visits to all of the medical professionals her mother saw. Mari had hated every single one of those appointments.
By the time her mother’s deteriorating condition was discovered, it was far too late to do anything meaningful. Even if it had been caught earlier, with the medical science available at that time, there hadn’t been much they could do beyond putting her on a heart transplant list. Her mother worried about how they would pay for it, or even if she could make it to the top of the list in time.
There had been a good chance of living five years or even longer after a transplant. Mari thought it was worth it, but her mother was more skeptical. She would have to endure the complicated post-operative treatments and medications, which would all cost even more money.
Unfortunately, it didn’t matter what either of them thought. Due to Francesca’s declining circulatory system, it was decided that she wouldn’t be a good candidate for a heart transplant because the doctors weren’t certain she could survive the surgery.
So that was that.
Toward the end, all Mari could do was keep her mother comfortable, doing her best to keep a previously very lively Francesca Roselli comfortable in bed until the inevitable happened.
From her teen years almost to her college graduation, Mari spent every moment she could caring for her ailing mother, hoping for a miracle that would extend her life.
Alas, it was not to be.
Francesca Roselli passed away at fifty-one, two months before her only daughter graduated from college with her degree in nursing. Mari had only been twenty-one. The hard luck of losing her one and only family member, friend and confidant was a bitter pill to swallow.
Mari hadn’t even wanted to finish college, not caring at that point about getting a degree she thought she was never going to use. She’d only gone in that direction because of her mother.
While the years she spent in nursing school had been helpful when it came to caring for her mother’s increasing medical needs, it almost seemed like a waste of Mari’s time once Francesca was gone forever.
She had said a tearful goodbye to her mother in a quiet ceremony with only Mari, the minister and the landlord of the building where they had lived in attendance.
Mari had spent the whole of her life by then thinking her father was some deadbeat dad who had abandoned her and her mother and left them with nothing. Instead, she found out her father was well-to-do. Very well-to-do.
In lieu of having any kind of personal relationship with either of them, he’d opted to give her mother support money for Mari once he found out about her existence.
She certainly wasn’t the first illegitimate child of an older, wealthy guy, nor would she be the last. What she hadn’t known until much later was that she had siblings. Quite a lot of them. And all sisters. She should have done more research, but was still reeling from her mother’s death.
Given her precarious situation at the time, she might not have had the courage to seek them out then anyway. She’d barely made it to this meeting without quite a bit of pressure from the executor, Miles Lang.
He had been insistent that she appear today and hear the reading of her father’s will. Part of her felt like a fraud. He hadn’t been a father to her. Not at all. Not in Mari’s definition of the word, anyway.
However, once the will had been read and she had been identified as Horatio Lovelock’s secret seventh daughter, that loud, clanging bell could never be unrung.
In the letter, her mother had told Mari about how she had met Horatio and how that led to her being conceived.
She wrote that she never regretted Mari’s birth for an instant. Her singular regret was finding out later that Horatio had still been married to his third wife, Sunshine, when they had been together.
Understanding her mother as she did, Mari knew that had troubled Francesca. She was not the sort of person who would knowingly be “the other woman.”
The other unsettling fact that Mari knew and likely no one else in this room did was that she was born about four months after the twins, Jessica and Jacklyn.
It was information that would come out in its own good time. She didn’t plan on revealing it or discussing it, no matter when that particular truth came out.
She looked around the room expectantly as Miles Lang, the only reason she was here, strolled inside and went to the desk at the front of the room.
Mari sincerely hoped she did not regret coming to the Lovelock Inn on Valentine Key for this reading of a stranger’s will.