‘I realise you said that you would be in touch,’ Charlotte said without bothering with any phoney pleasantries. ‘But I can’t just sit around and wait until you decide the time is right to come knocking on my door with your so-called “solution”.’
‘Sit.’ It was a command rather than an invitation, and Charlotte momentarily hesitated, not liking the fact that he was issuing orders. He had never been like this years ago, had he? Then she told herself that it was not in her interests to keep remembering the man who he had once been. It distracted her from the man who he now was, and this was the man she had to keep at a distance, whatever physical connection existed between them in the form of their daughter.
She sat and was relieved when he followed suit, although in his case it was behind his grand desk, which was a feat of modern carpentry, multi-grained wood with lines so smooth that it looked untouched by human hand.
‘So?’ Riccardo pushed himself away from the desk so that he could cross his legs at an angle, then he looked at her, in no rush to break the silence. Of course, he was mildly interested in what she had to say and would certainly give her her chance to speak, but already he knew his solution. As he had watched her hovering there by the door, it had come to him as an almost inevitable conclusion.
‘I don’t want to talk about the past. I know how you feel, I know you think that I should somehow have appeared heavily pregnant on your mother’s doorstep, even if I was terrified that you would have taken my baby away from me. I guess, in your mind, I should have been prepared to do that as well. I was just a scared, disillusioned kid, but I should have mustered up the courage and taken whatever was doled out to me by you and your mother.’
Riccardo scowled. Put like that, he could feel a reluctant sympathy. In fact, put like that, he didn’t much care for the person he had been eight years ago. He was guiltily aware of how terrifying it must have been for her to have shown up unannounced, only to find her arrival greeted with rejection. Of course, that was no excuse to have denied him his rights as a father, but he could reluctantly see her point of view.
‘But I didn’t, and, yes, don’t imagine that I didn’t think about letting you know when Gina was born, when she was growing up.’
‘But you successfully managed to squash the temptation.’
‘Temptation isn’t exactly the word I would have used,’ Charlotte admitted truthfully. ‘It felt more like a duty that I just…well, could put off. I imagined how you would react, and it was easier to walk away from dealing with the situation.’
‘Would you ever have mustered the courage or would you have been happy to let sleeping dogs lie—maybe tell Gina that her father had died, make up some story when she started asking too many questions?’
Charlotte looked at him with genuine horror. ‘What kind of person do you think I am?’
‘The kind who takes the easy way out!’
‘Not to the point of lying to Gina about you! I always knew that sooner or later she would demand to know who you were, and I was prepared for that!’
Riccardo didn’t point out that by that indeterminate point in the future he would have been a complete stranger to his daughter, and the possibility of any bonding would have been close to zero. She was right. It would be easy to become locked in perpetual arguing over who had been right and who had been wrong, but in the end there was fault on both sides.
Although, he told himself piously, he had obviously been the loser.
‘So you came here to tell me…?’ Riccardo dragged the matter out of the boxing ring and back into civilised territory.