Daisy’s face was pale. “Then you were born...”
“Right.” Leonidas gave a crooked smile. “Nine months later, I was born. Their marriage was saved. And that was the end of it.”
Setting down her sketchbook carefully on the table, she rose to her feet. Going to him on the edge of the terrace, she said quietly, “What really happened?”
His heart was pounding painfully beneath his ribs. “I’m the only one alive,” he whispered, “who knows the full story.”
Leonidas looked down at the pounding surf on the white sand beach below.
“From the time I was born, everything I did or said seemed to set my father on edge, making him yell that I was useless and stupid. My mother just avoided me. It was only at fourteen, after my father’s funeral, that I learned the reason why.”
Standing beside him, Daisy didn’t say a word.
“I always had the best clothes, the best education money could buy. Appearance was what mattered to them. No one must criticize how they treated their only child.” He paused. “If not for Maria, I’m not sure I would have survived.”
Reaching out, she put her hand over his on the railing. “Leo...”
Leonidas pulled his hand away. He couldn’t bear to be touched. Not now. Not even by her. “I knew something was wrong with me. I could not please them, no matter how I tried. Something about me was so awful that my own father and mother despised me. And though everyone in Greece seemed to think my parents still had this great love affair, at home, they ignored each other—or threw dishes and screamed. Because of me.”
“Why would you blame yourself for their marriage problems?”
For a moment, he fell silent. “I heard them sometimes, arguing at night, when I was home during school holidays.” He glanced back at the villa. “This is a big house. But sometimes they were loud. One of them always seemed to be threatening divorce. But neither was willing to give up the Picasso. That was the sticking point. Custody of the painting. Not me.”
Her stricken eyes met his.
Leonidas paused, then said in a low voice, “When I asked if I could stay at my boarding school year-round, they agreed. Because they could tell other people they’d only done it to make me happy. Appearance was all that mattered to them. My parents stayed together in their glamorous, beautiful lives, pretending to be happy.”
“How could they live like that?”
“My father quietly drank himself to death.” His lips twisted upward. “When I came home to attend his funeral, I was shocked when my mother hugged me, crying into my arms. I was fourteen, still young enough to be desperate for a mother’s love.” Leonidas still hated to remember that rainy afternoon, as he’d stared at his father’s grave, and his mother, dressed all in black, had embraced him. “I thought maybe she needed me at last. That she...loved me.” He gave a bitter smile. “But after the service was over, and her society friends were gone, my mother stopped pretending to be grief stricken. She calmly told me that she was leaving me in the care of trustees until I inherited my father’s estate. She was moving to Turkey to be with her lover. She said there was no reason for us to ever see
each other again.”
“What?” Daisy cried. “She said that? At your father’s funeral? How could she?”
He gave a low laugh. “I asked her. Why, Mamá? Why have you always hated me? What’s wrong with me?” His jaw tightened. “And she finally told me.”
Silence fell on the villa’s terrace. Leonidas heard the wind through nearby trees, ruffling the pages of his wife’s sketchbook on the table.
“My father had been enraged at my mother telling their friends that it was his fault they couldn’t conceive, that he wasn’t a real man. He wanted to shut her up—and go back to being the golden couple of society.” He narrowed his eyes. “He had a brother, Dimitris, his identical twin, a few minutes younger. My grandfather had cut off Dimitris without a dime for his scandals, leaving him nothing to buy drugs with. Until my father came to him with an offer—asking him to make love to my mother in the dark and cause her to conceive a child without realizing that the man impregnating her wasn’t my father.” He paused. “My uncle agreed. And he succeeded.”
“What are you saying?”
“My uncle was my real father.” Leonidas took a deep breath. “I never knew him. Before I was born, he burned himself out in a blaze of drugs. My father had believed that after I was born, he’d be able to forget he wasn’t my real father. After all, biologically I would be, or close enough. But he couldn’t forget that his brother had made love to his wife. And he couldn’t forgive her for not noticing the difference. Shortly after I was born, when my mother lashed out at him for ignoring their new baby, he exploded, and called her a whore.”
Daisy’s face was stricken. “Oh, Leo...”
“She forced him to explain. After that, she couldn’t forgive what he’d done to her, that she’d made love to her drug-addicted brother-in-law without knowing it. Her own husband had tricked her. Every time she looked at her newborn baby—me—she felt dirty and betrayed.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “But it wasn’t your fault—none of it!”
He took a deep breath, looking up bleakly as plaintive seagulls flew across the stark blue sky. “And yet, it all was.”
“No,” Daisy whispered.
“Appearance is what matters,” he said flatly. “Giannis wasn’t really my father, and my parents despised each other. But to the outside world, they pretended they were in love. They pretended they were happy.” He paused. “They pretended to be my parents.”
Tears were streaking Daisy’s cheeks.