He frowned. “It’s different. I’m ...”
“Oh, let me guess? A big, brave, macho man?”
“I was going to say,” he corrected with a grimace, “a man who was raised knowing he would be Sheikh. Tears weren’t tolerated – ever – in my upbringing.”
It was enough of a revelation to have Chloe’s mind changing courses, uncovering the stones of this. Her own upbringing had been lonely, cold, devoid of the kind of family interactions most people took for granted. But what had it been like for Raffa?
“I have a problem with that,” she said, reaching for some cheese and grapes and placing them on her plate.
“Oh?”
“Firstly, I don’t think you would ever have been prone to crying. It’s just not… you. And secondly, you are definitely not the kind of man who, even as a boy, would have been dictated to. In fact, I dare say that had someone urged you to stop crying, you would have carried on for days, just to spite them.”
He dipped his head forward but Chloe was certain she saw the hint of a smile on his face. “I cried,” he said after a moment, “when my mother died. And when your father died.”
“I was angry when he died,” she said with a twist of her lips. “I was angry about the article, angry that it must been the last thing he saw. You know they found him with it in bed? He’d read it, and then he had a heart attack.”
Raffa nodded. “I had heard that. Your brother was similarly furious. Devastated, too. So many revelations that should have stayed private…”
“It was just conjecture,” she brushed it aside. “How could a journalist know the details she claimed to?”
Apollo remained silent, unable to disclose what he knew of the situation – unable to tell his young wife that the article was, indeed, accurate. That the journalist’s source had been correctly quoted: that the source of the article was Apollo himself. He could tell her none of these things, because his friend had sworn him to secrecy, and even now, even with Chloe as his wife in every sense of the word, he couldn’t break the bonds of trust that he and Apollo had forged years earlier.
“I didn’t.” Chloe continued speaking, unaware of the direction of her husband’s thoughts. “Cry when my father died, I mean.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t know why. I just don’t cry often. I was sad, I think – but because of an imagined future I had lost, rather than any special bond we’d shared. Death is sad – always. An old man who’s lived well and fast and long? It’s hard to see grief in that.”
“Will you feel that way when my own father goes?”
Chloe paled, her face instantly rejecting his words.
“So it is not so natural after all?” he prompted, his point well-made.
“Malik is so dynamic. It’s hard to imagine his body turning to dust and memory.”
“Your father was just as much so.”
“Not to me.” She speared a piece of octopus and ate it without tasting its salty sweetness.
“What was he like to you?”
“Does it matter?”
“Indulge me.”
And for a flash of a second, just an instant wedged in time, she remembered the way they’d indulged one another only an hour earlier. The way he’d stormed into her room and taken her because it had seemed as though he couldn’t live and breathe for a moment longer in a world that didn’t have their bodies intimately intertwined. She wanted more of that; not this. And yet, hadn’t it been Chloe’s insistence that they get to know one another?
She licked her lower lip, and exhaled slowly. “I told you already. He was busy.”
“When he was married. Then he divorced and your mother spent every spare minute with random men. You saw your father when?”
“Once a year, if that. I didn’t see him at all from my eighth birthday to my eleventh.”
Raffa did the math. “The Veronica years?”
She grimaced. “Yes. Of course, I never met that stepmother.”
“I did. You haven’t missed anything special.”
Chloe shrugged. “Diego didn’t want me.” She took a sip of her wine and then met Raffa’s eyes. “It took me a long time to come to terms with that; to accept that he wished I hadn’t been born. It’s somewhat freeing to be able to say that now, without fear, without grief. As a statement of fact, as it is. He didn’t want me.”