“Better than you?” I scoffed.
I tried to tug my hand away, but the gesture was half-hearted. I allowed him to keep it firmly in his, enjoying the feel of his long fingers threaded between mine.
“I’m glad you still think something good of me, Ces,” Xavier said bitterly. “It’s probably the only nice thing I ever did anyway, agreeing to marry her. Got my father off my back, too. Turns out the only thing Rupert Parker liked more than forcing his errant heir to heel was that heir marrying a rich heiress. Suddenly, everything was about the wedding. And I could do what I damn well pleased.”
“Like screwing me?”
The tears pricked harder. This wasn’t making me feel better. It was making me feel like the other woman. The slut who ruined everything.
“Like falling in love.” Xavier’s soft, deep words floated across the table. “Or so I thought.”
My tongue just choked in the back of my throat while I tried to blink back my tears. I would not cry here. I absolutely would not.
By the time I was able to look up at him, he allowed me to pull my hand away so I could pick up my tea. You couldn’t cry while drinking, Nonna had told me once. I polished off the entire cup in one go.
“Look,” Xavier said, once I’d finally set down my cup.
His large blue eyes glimmered with hunger. Pain. The desire for me to know the truth.
“I should’ve told you about Lucy from the beginning,” he said. “She knew all about you. She did. It’s why she wouldn’t let me marry her. We were going to call off the engagement when I got back. But the day I was supposed to see you last, Luce called me with the news. She’d been tired, thought it was because of the wedding preparations. But turns out it was a brain tumor. Cancer. Stage four. Terminal, of course, but made worse by her syndrome.”
I swallowed thickly. It was hard to hate a dead woman, especially one who clearly had been such a saint. It was even harder when, with every revelation, I could imagine her in my head. I could see her last days, shriveled up like a prune, unable to get out of bed. Ruined by chemo, medicine, surgeries, whatever the doctors told her.
“How—how long?” I wondered.
“The doctors gave her nine months,” Xavier replied. “She lasted six.”
“Jesus,” I whispered.
“I had to go back, Ces. I couldn’t leave her to go through all that on her own. I told her I’d marry her too. I’d stick with her, through thick and thin, just like she did with me. But she wouldn’t let me. And then when she died…a part of me died too. For a while, anyway.”
We sat there in silence, both of us digesting the end. It was hard to hear a story like this without feeling my own pangs of grief. My father’s funeral was one of my first memories, a cold, rainy day at the St. Raymond Cemetery. And then later, echoed again when my grandfather died maybe six years later. But despite longing for a mother who was absent after her part in her husband’s accident, I’d still spent most of my life around people who loved me in their own way. Between Nonna’s old-fashioned child-rearing, Matthew’s overprotectiveness, and my sisters’ chaos, I had never wanted for love. Not like Xavier.
Now was the time to tell him. Explain that he wasn’t alone in the world. Not now. That in Brooklyn, there was a little girl who looked just like him. Who was dying to know who her daddy was. Who would give him all the love in the world if he would just let her.
But the problem was, I wasn’t sure he would.
“Fucking hell,” Xavier snapped bitterly. “What’s a man gotta do to get a real drink around here?” He turned, looking around for the chittering bar girl. “Oi, girl! Got any vodka back there?”
My chair leg screeched across the worn wood floors as I stood up. Xavier turned back, looking up at me warily.
“Leaving?” he asked. “Did I scare you off, then?”
But to my surprise, I shook my head as I pulled my coat back on.
“Let’s walk,” I said. “We can go to that restaurant if you want. Or there’s a good ramen place down the street, if you’d rather. They make cocktails, and I could use a drink too. And you need more to eat.”
Xavier tipped his head, examining me for some other revelation. “I could do with some noodles.”
I nodded, then pulled my purse over my shoulder. “Then let’s go. I have more questions. But I’m…willing to talk too. If you want.”