“Did you always know you wanted to write?”
She was quiet for a moment. “I did, yeah. I loved to read, but I would often get frustrated by the way a story ended. I wanted to reach inside the pages and rearrange them, to give the characters something different. The only way I could do that was to write my own book, so I did.” He looked towards her as a faraway look overtook her eyes. Rather than interrupt her, he hunted around until he found a spoon and bowl, and began to scrape the seeds from the tomatoes, placing them all into the bowl. “We didn’t have a lot growing up. My mum’s a doctor, but she works for War Zone, the charity, so didn’t earn a huge salary, and she’s away almost all the time. It was pretty much just dad and me.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s a high school English teacher.”
“Uh huh, so this is where you get your love of books?”
“Undoubtedly.” She nodded. “Every Friday night, we’d go to the library and borrow as many books as they’d let us. Our weekends were spent reading.” She reached for a sprig of rosemary that was in a vase on the counter and ran her fingertips over the blades. As with before, he admired the deftness of her slim fingers, momentarily distracted not just by her body but by her words. “In the summer, we’d throw the books into a basket with some grapes and cheese and go and find a park. We’d spend all day on a picnic blanket, reading, snacking, cloud-watching. It was bliss.”
A jolt of something a lot like envy speared Nico, surprising him with its intensity. “He sounds like an attentive father.”
“He was. Is.” She nodded, but there was a cloud over her expression now.
“You’re close to him still?”
“Sort of.” She looked away and he knew there was so much more to this than she was saying. Before he could think of a way to tease out some more information, she smiled brightly and leaned forward a little. “What about you? You’re a Montebello, you help run your family corporation – as you do -,” she added teasingly. “You spend summers in this idyllic town. What else?”
“What do you want to know?” He thought of how much information there was about him on the internet. He was an open book because he was basically forced to be. As a teenager and in his early twenties, he hadn’t yet learned the discretion that was now his stock in trade. So much of his life had been played out for the tabloids and it lived online to this day – a stark reminder to guard what he said and did with great care.
“Are you close to your parents?”
“No.” Finished with the tomatoes, he pulled an onion from the bowl on the bench. He began to chop it, but he could feel her eyes on him the whole time. “My upbringing wasn’t conventional.” He lifted his shoulders. “Then again, whose is?”
“A lot of peoples,” she offered. “But yeah, I can imagine you grew up in a pretty rarefied way.”
“You could say that.” He placed the knife down and her eyes followed the blade’s journey. “Now, I need a really big pot.”
She lifted her eyes heavenwards. “Up there.” He turned around and saw all the pots were above the cupboards. He reached for the largest and when he turned around to face her, there was a look of bemusement on her face. “Maybe you need to reach for something else?” He frowned, not understanding, but then her eyes roamed his body and he laughed, her obvious admiration spreading answering desire through him.
“You do realise I have to grab a stool anytime I want to get a pot down?”
“You do realise you’re about a foot shorter than me?”
He turned the stove top on, placed the pot down and added a dash of olive oil then the onion and a clove of garlic he crushed quickly.
“You really are a good cook,” she admired after a moment, when the air was thick with the savoury aroma of the spices.
“You haven’t eaten it yet.”
“I can tell already.”
“My Yaya,” he said after a moment, a smile on his lips as he thought of the grandmother who’d raised him, and his brothers and cousins. “She insisted we all learn to cook – with varying degrees of success. I was probably the most willing of her students, but by the time we went off to high school, we could all make a few meals. And when we came home on holidays, she’d draw up a roster to make sure we each had a turn doing dinner.”
“That sounds like a very humble way to grow up, given you probably had a trust fund the size of a small country.”
“It was.” He added the tomato shells, stirring them until they were coated in garlic and onion, then placing a lid on top to let them sweat for a few minutes. “Yaya didn’t grow up with money. In fact, she grew up – how did you say it? With not a lot? And despite Gianfelice’s success and means, she never stopped being frugal. Even now, she saves newspapers to wrap Christmas gifts in.” His smile was indulgent. “She is the reason I will freeze that pulp,” he nodded to the bowl on the bench, “rather than throwing it out. It will make a good passata,” he imitated Yaya’s Greek accent.
“My dad’s just the same,” Maddie nodded. “He reuses everything, wastes very little.” She tilted her head to one side. “Then again, he kind of had to be like that. Your Yaya could have gone the other way and become spoiled by what she had.”
“True. But I think childhood indelibly shapes the person you become.” He paused a moment, thinking of how true that was. Being pushed out of his mother’s life at four years of age had left him with a cold stone in the centre of his being that nothing had ever managed to shake free. “The lessons Yaya learned never left her. She always used to say, knowing what true hunger is like makes you desperate never to feel it again. She doesn’t like to talk about her childhood much but I know it was traumatic, difficult.”
“So she’s…”
“Still alive? Si,” a smile curved his lips. “She’s frail and growing old in a way I never thought she would – she’s one of those women that just seems youthful despite her years – but she’s still Yaya.”
“She sounds like a fascinating woman.”