‘I know what it is like to grow up an accidental baby, unwanted.” She’d thought about it a lot and as much as she had wanted her baby, she could not ignore the problems inherent in the life of a child rejected by its father before birth.
‘But you wanted this baby.” His voice was thick, almost as if he was holding back some intolerable emotion.
‘yes but you didn’t. She would have grown up wondering what was wrong with her that she wasn’t worthy of her father’s love. I’m not saying this to make you feel guilty, but so you understand that sometimes tragedies like this happen for a reason.”
‘I would have wanted my child.”
Only he hadn’t believed the baby had been his. She didn’t labor the point. The brandy was having its effect, and right now she just did not want to fight with him any more.
He didn’t give her the chance.
‘Did you feel unloved by your father?”
She sighed, trying to untangle the mess of emotions she had felt about her father during her growing-up years.
‘No. Not unloved but not particularly wanted either. I was the symbol of his one big mistake. I wasn’t the kind of daughter he could understand, not like Annemarie. I was different, not traditional, not really Sicilian. I didn’t fit and I felt that. Every summer I came to stay and reminded him that his perfect little family had a cuckoo in it.”
Salvatore sat down on the bed. ‘This hurt you.”
What was the use in denying it? ‘Yes.”
‘And your mother?”
‘She hated the very word mother but she was too independent and proud to let Salvatore have custody of me. So I spent a lot of time in boarding-school or with nannies.”
‘That is terrible.”
She shrugged. ‘lt was all right really. I hated living at home.”
‘My mother surrounds herself with sycophants and neither she nor they have any concept of commitment and caring in a relationship. It was ugly and it hurt to see my own mother hopping from one man’s bed to another so easily.”
Salvatore wanted to ask why, if that was true, she had allowed herself to become like her mother, but he didn’t. She was talking to him more freely than she had since telling him about the baby.
”So when you were an adult you settled in Italy, away from your mother.”
‘But also away from your father. Why didn’t you move to Sicily?”
‘papa is a traditional Sicilian father. If I lived near him, it would have to be with him and that would not be fair to either Therese or Annemarie.”
‘What do you mean?”
‘I would not want to disrupt their home life like that. They tolerate my visits in the summer. That’s enough ”
‘They are your family.”
‘No.” Resignation not sadness laced her voice.
‘I don’t belong.”
He felt as if he’d been kicked by a horse in the solar plexus. This woman, who had enough confidence to practically run Adamo’s business single-handedly, did not believe she had a place in her own family.
That knowledge was still haunting Salvatore the next day when he drove Elisa to work.
She was quiet, subdued, but the hostility that had marked her reaction to him the day before was missing and for that he was grateful.
‘Have you sent the invitations to the auction?” he asked her as he parked the car in front of Adamo Jewelers.
‘yes. Several people have already replied. It should be a good turn-out.”