‘My grandfather wrote to you?’
Her throat had gone dry and her breath caught.
‘Yes. It seems he had certain concerns for his great-grandson’s welfare and his future. He felt he could not entrust you to deal with them, so he felt it necessary to write to me.’
Louise struggled to prevent her pent-up breath leaking away in an unsteady jerky movement that might betray her to him. It was true that her grandfather had had concerns about the growing anger and resentment Ollie was demonstrating towards her. He had even warned her that with so many families in their community knowing what they believed to be the story of her disgrace it wouldn’t be long before Ollie was given that version of events at school. Children could be cruel to one another, both deliberately and accidentally, and Louise knew that Ollie already felt alienated enough from his peers because of his inability to name and claim a father, or even the family of his father, without the situation being made worse. However, as her grandfather had known, her hands had been tied.
It came as a dreadful shock to know that despite everything they had discussed, and despite the fact that she had believed her grandfather understood and accepted her decision, he had fallen victim to centuries of tradition and in his last weeks of life reverted to the Sicilian way of life she herself so much resented. Despite her love for him, and all that she owed him, after listening to Caesar Falconari’s revelation it was impossible for her to stop her anger spilling over.
‘He had no right to do that even if he did think he was acting in Ollie’s best interests,’ she said sharply. ‘He knew how I felt about this whole Sicilian community thing of referring everything that is seen as some kind of problem to the community’s patronne for judgement. It’s totally archaic.’
‘Basta! Enough! Your grandfather did not write to me as his patronne. He wrote to me because he claims that I am Oliver’s father.’
The pain was immediate and intense, as though someone had ripped away the top layer of her skin, flooding her emotions, opening the locked gates to the past with all its shame and humiliation. She was eighteen again, shamed and disgraced, filled with confusing and only half-understood emotions that had come out of nowhere to change the path of her life for ever and marked her out in public as a fallen woman.
She could still see her father’s face, with its expression of anger mixed with rejection as he’d looked at her, whilst Melinda had given her a gloating smile of triumph as she’d drawn her own daughters close to her and taken hold of her father’s hand so that they formed a small close group that excluded her. Her grandfather’s face had lost its colour, and her grandmother’s hands had been trembling as she’d folded them together in her lap. No one seated in the popular café-bar in the small village square could have failed to hear the awful denunciation the headman of her grandparents’ home village had made, labelling her as a young woman who had shamed her family by what she had done.
Automatically she’d turned to Caesar Falconari for support, but he had turned away from her, getting up from his seat to walk away, leaving her undefended and unloved—just as her father had done.
Hadn’t she already been punished enough for her vulnerability and foolishness, without the added horror of this?
Louise winced, unable to stop that small betraying reaction to her memories of the past. She was still sensitive to his rejection. That should have been impossible. It was impossible, she assured herself. Her body was merely reacting to the memory of the pain he had once caused her, that was all. She needed to be here, in the present, not retreating to the past.
The very fact that he had spoken to her in Italian, with a harshly critical edge to his voice, was enough to warn Louise that Caesar was losing his patience with her—but why should she care about that when she had so much more to worry about? Oliver was her son—hers. He had nothing to do with Caesar, and if she had her way he never ever would. Even if Caesar had fathered him.
Caesar watched and saw the emotion she was struggling to suppress. The muscles in his own body tightened as he recognised that he would have preferred it had she immediately flown into a practised and fluent verbal assertion that her grandfather was right rather than accept that she was very obviously shocked, angry and afraid, and fighting not to show any of those feelings instead of laying claim to them. Hardly the action of a woman who wanted to claim him as the father of her child.
Louise shivered inwardly. How could her grandfather have done this to her? How could he have betrayed her like that? Shock, disbelief, pain, fear, and anger—Louise felt them all. And yet at the same time part of her could understand what might have motivated him.
She could so vividly remember that night—beaten down by the insistence of both her parents that she should have her pregnancy terminated, weeping in her grandmother’s arms, feeling abandoned and afraid. She had finally told her grandparents what she had previously kept a secret: namely that, far from there being any number of young men to have potentially fathered her child, as the headman of the village had insinuated, there was only one who could have done so. And that one was no other than Caesar Falconari, Duca di Falconari, overlord of the vast wealth and estates on Sicily that had been her grandparents’ birthplace.
Her grandparents had promised her that they would never betray that secret—but then they must have recognized, as she had known herself, that no one would ever believe her if she were to make such a claim. Especially not when Caesar himself … But, no. She was not going to go down that road. Not now and not ever. The bitterness of her past was best left buried beneath the new flesh she had grown over her old wounds. And besides she had Oliver to think of now.
She lifted her head and confronted Caesar. ‘All you need to know about Oliver is that he is my son and only my son.’
He had been afraid of this, Caesar admitted. His mouth compressing, he reached into his jacket pocket and produced the envelope containing her grandfather’s letter, which he removed and placed on the table. As he did so the photographs her grandfather had enclosed with the letter fell onto the table.
Louise saw them immediately, her breath catching in a sharp drawn-in sound of rejection.
How different she looked in that old photograph taken that summer … They had all come here to Sicily, supposedly for a family holiday that would establish the new family dynamics that were being put in place following her parents’ divorce. It had been Melinda’s idea that she and her girls and Louise’s father should join Louise and her grandparents on their visit to their original home, whilst Louise’s mother was spending the summer with her ‘friend’ in Palm Springs.
Right from the start Louise had been in no doubt about Melinda’s motives for suggesting the holiday. Melinda had wanted to reinforce yet again how unimportant she was to her father, and in contrast how important she and her own children were. That had been made obvious right from the start. And she had stupidly reacted exactly as Melinda had no doubt hoped she would, by doing everything she could to focus her father’s attention on herself by the only means she knew—behaving so badly that he was forced to take notice of her.
Looking at herself in that photograph, it was hard for her not to cringe. She remembered that she had been attempting not just to emulate what she had naively perceived as Melinda’s ‘sexy’ dressing, she had also attempted to outdo it. So she had translated the smooth sleekness of Melinda’s dark brown hair into a black-dyed stringy mess that had clung to her scalp stiff with product. Melinda’s favourite clingy short white jersey dress she had translated into a far too short, tight black jersey number, which she’d worn with stiletto heels instead of the pretty sandals of Melinda’s
