‘It was a strange reality to find myself in,’ he said truthfully, remembering that first afternoon, walking around the mansion, the servants’ whispers filling his young ears, Leonidas’s mother’s shrieks burning them.
The knowledge, weeks later, that he was responsible for breaking up their family.
He turned away from her, his expression suddenly stony.
‘Do you ever speak to her now?’
‘No.’
‘God.’ Alice reached a hand out and curved her fingers over his forearm. ‘That’s a really awful thing to have gone through.’
He shrugged. ‘I guess so. But you know what?’
‘What?’ Her voice was thick with emotion.
‘It gave me Leonidas.’ He turned to face her. ‘I don’t have much of a mom or a dad, but I have a brother who also happens to be my best friend. And I think sometimes the war zone we grew up in—parents who were always fighting, our dad going through a string of wives who were all destined to be disposed of within a year or two of the marriage—meant we grew even closer. You know?’
‘Sure, like a shared trauma,’ she agreed. ‘I can definitely see that.’
‘So when we realised the extent of his criminal activities, it was sort of easy to just emotionally detach from the mess he’d made. We cut him out of our lives and focussed on what really mattered.’
‘Rebuilding your wealth?’
‘The wealth, sure, but, more importantly, our grandfather’s legacy. We spent a lot of time with him. He was the one who really raised us. We both felt we owed it to him to fix what our father had done.’
There was silence except for the gentle lapping of salt water against the side of the yacht.
‘I think what you did is amazing.’
He jerked his gaze to hers.
‘I mean it,’ she insisted, perhaps intuiting his surprise. ‘To come out of the scandal and shock of what your father did, to put it behind you, to focus on making good from bad—that’s not something everyone has the strength to do.’
‘But you do,’ he said, after a moment, making the connection easily.
‘You think?’
‘Sure. Look at how you’re caring for your mom. You’re a young woman who’s put her mother ahead of everything else, who’s doing all that is good and right because you love her. What’s that if not layering good over bad?’
Alice shook her head softly. ‘What else could I do?’
‘You’ve given up just about everything for her.’
‘She gave up everything for me.’
‘How so?’
Alice gnawed on her lip. He lifted a thumb and padded it over her lip, so she stopped, her eyes huge when they met his. ‘We were really poor.’ Her cheeks flushed with pink as she made the admission and he wondered, for a moment, if she was embarrassed to admit that to him. ‘And Mom was incredibly bright. She should have had a dream career before her, but instead she got pregnant with me and had to work really hard just to keep her head above water.’
‘What about your father?’
Alice closed her book, placing it on the deck beside her. The sunshine bounced off the cover, making it sparkle.
‘I never knew him.’
‘They weren’t married?’
‘No.’