“Your mother kept it for you. You’re my daughter, and I may not have always been the best father—Leo will tell you that.” He pauses, looking genuinely pained. “I made too many mistakes with all of you. Maybe keeping my distance, watching you from afar was the best decision I made. In spite of everything I’ve done, and failed to do, I have always loved you. Every one of you. I was able to give the boys everything they wanted and needed, and I needed to do the same for you.”
He stops when the waitress returns with our drinks. The silence allows me to go over all that he just said. There’s a lot of pain and regret in his words, something that makes me wonder whether the decision to be a bystander in my life was all his. I’m certain that he loved Mum enough that he would never want to blight my memory of her.
“That money,” he continues when the waitress leaves with our food order. Casper ordered for the two of us given that I was too in my own head to think about lunch. “That money is yours.”
“Mine?”
God, there was so much of it.
“Yes. Grace was always careful about the detail. Obsessive about it. I thought she used the money I gave her every month. It was part of our agreement. I wasn’t going to let another man provide for you. It wasn’t right, but your mother never used it. She put it aside for you. In case she had to leave you.”
Tears fill my eyes instantly. I wish I could make them stop, but everything has made the wound of losing her too soon raw. Every time we talk about her, it’s like someone pulling the scab away and driving a dagger into it.
“Why did you st
ay away after she died? I was on my own. There was no one. No one that understood what it was really like to lose her.”
Casper brings his chair closer, wrapping his arm around my chest so that I lean into him. What would I do without him?
“Only a handful of people knew that you’re mine. Grace told Penny, and Penny told Francis. I had no clue what my father was involved in when I told him. Rosalind and I were divorced, and your mum and I—” He stops, taking a moment to coo over Grace as she stretches in his arms. It’s obvious he loves her with how he looks at her longingly.
“It was a cluster of mistakes and manoeuvring of consequences. Those five years until…until the day they told me she was gone.” Lucian sighs with a heaviness that’s palpable in my bones. “They were nothing like we thought they would be. Everything we’d talked about took a back seat when Charles found out that you were mine. My father told him, right before I suspect he drew him into this mess with the Russians.”
“Why would he tell him?”
“Nothing drives a man’s worst intentions like wounded pride,” Casper answers.
I look in his direction to find him studying me. The solemn expression on his face with that statement is enough to make me understand everything I failed to with what happened with Ryan.
“A man takes great pride in what he chooses to love,” Lucian murmurs, staring down at Grace as he strokes her face. “And Charles loved Grace. He loved the side of her that was perfect—it was the other side he didn’t understand and that came between them. It was always the side I loved most. The side that burned the brightest, even if it caused more trouble than any of us knew it could.”
“If he loved her, why would she…why…”
“It wasn’t enough. You can’t fully love someone without loving every part of them. And I loved every part of her, enough to walk away from all this. It was just too late when I did. It was too late to save her like I should have.
“For what it’s worth, she didn’t want to be saved. She wanted to save everyone around her.”
It’s why her first instinct was to hide me away. All those hours I spent in the dark, terrified, they were all because she truly believed she was keeping me safe. In hindsight, knowing what I know now, she probably was.
Our food arrives, and Lucian doesn’t give Grace back until we leave. The entire time I’m thinking over everything, and my chest weighs a tonne. Walking home, Casper pushes the buggy with one hand while holding me with the other. His quiet is nothing new, but in light of how I’m feeling, it’s louder than ever.
The late afternoon is balmy, and with Grace being awake again, we walk though one of the parks. It’s quiet, and most of the other people around us are nannies chasing after their charges.
The flower gardens are coming into full bloom, and it reminds me of Spain. The weight in my chest leadens with the longing to be back there.
“Can we sit for a while?” I ask as we go past one of the benches.
Casper looks around, always assessing our surroundings. Making sure that we’re safe. Everything he does is always with me and Grace in mind.
“For a little bit while it’s still light.”
When we’re settled on the bench with one of the casually dressed security guys on the one across the path, I finally say, “Sorry.”
Casper doesn’t say anything. He inhales deeply as though I’ve finally taken a burden off him.
“I didn’t understand. I took it at face value, just a gesture that caused another person obvious hurt. But I-I overlooked the hurt I caused you in both what I did and by not understanding why or that you were hurting too.”
Casper nods. I think my open acknowledgement of what I did, and the consequences of it, makes him uncomfortable because it’s a vulnerability.