Gone was the witty, charming, exciting man she had met two months ago, gone too was the confident, arrogant, overwhelming man. In his place was a strained, tense shadow of that man.
‘I’m so sorry about today,’ Ellie said, deciding there wasn’t much point in avoiding the obvious. ‘I thought if he came, he would be...’ She shrugged. Good God, what did she really know about the inner workings of a family like theirs, when hers had been so small and constricted? ‘More open.’
Isabella smiled, her expression kind and thoughtful, which made Ellie feel like more of a fraud. She had no right to be here, witnessing their pain.
‘It’s not your fault,’ the other woman said. ‘We’re still incredibly glad you got him here,’ she added. ‘It’s a big step in the right direction.’
‘Do you really think so?’ Ellie asked, wanting to believe her, but not convinced Alex would ever return.
‘I’m sure it is.’ Isabella turned to gaze out of the window, where Alex was still playing basketball with Arianna’s two oldest children even though night had fallen. His other siblings were washing up, putting younger children to bed, or watching the rerun of a baseball game in the rec room. But Ellie had felt the energy in the house drop as soon as Alex had gone outside, and she knew, just as his siblings knew, the decision to go shoot hoops with the children was another avoidance tactic.
‘We don’t want to pressure him,’ she added, the sadness in her eyes unmistakable when her gaze returned to Ellie. ‘Something happened to Sandro a long time ago, before Pop died.’ She took the framed photo from Ellie. ‘You can see it in his face here. I think Ari tried to talk to him about it, when Mom died. Matty too. But he blew them off. And he’s been avoiding us ever since...’ Isabella shrugged. ‘Sandro was only eleven when Pop died, but it was like Mom blamed him somehow, like she couldn’t look at him,’ she said, echoing what Mia had said two days ago. ‘She packed him off to that boarding school when he got a scholarship, and wouldn’t even let him come home for vacations after the first couple of years. We all knew how much that hurt him, even though he wouldn’t admit it. I’m sure that’s why he doesn’t want to see us now. If only he would talk to us about it. But we can’t force that, he has to decide he can trust us again.’ She placed the photo on the sideboard, then smiled at Ellie, the gesture so generous, so open, Ellie’s heart contracted in her chest. ‘You got him to come, Ellie, and we can’t thank you enough for that.’ She laughed, the smoky sound full of hope. ‘Seeing the way he looks at you, me and my sisters are totally convinced, anything is possible now.’
‘Why?’ Ellie asked, confused. ‘I don’t have any influence over him.’
Isabella grinned. ‘Of course you do,’ she said. ‘When you’re the first woman he’s ever fallen in love with.’
He doesn’t love me—that’s just nuts. Isabella is clearly even more of a cock-eyed optimist than I am.
Ellie repeated the mantra in her head, to try and dispel the bubble of hope that had been sitting under her breastbone ever since she and Alex had left the Da Costa’s Christmas gathering to drive back to Manhattan ten minutes ago.
Alex sat silent and rigid beside her as the car headed across the Brooklyn Bridge. The string of white lights attached to the iconic bridge’s suspension cables glowed through the scatter of new snowfall, guiding their way through the night back home.
Except his apartment is not your home.
She pushed the thought down, past the bubble of hope, to concentrate on something she had decided was more important while she had watched Alex say stilted goodbyes to his family.
What made it so hard for him to be a part of his own family? Was it rooted in the experiences of that wary child, the mysterious thing that Isabella had referred to that had changed him so fundamentally but that he couldn’t talk about even now?
Would it be so wrong to try and help him heal? Because whatever it was that was holding him back, it seemed so wrong to her not to embrace people—kind, good, generous people—who wanted so much to be a part of his life.
The silence continued as they drove through the Lower East Side, the streets mostly empty, the swish of the snow against the tyres the only sound.
A part of her knew she didn’t have the right to probe into his past. But if she didn’t, who would? She couldn’t bear the thought of Alex sealing himself off again, when his family had so much to offer him. After all, she knew what he was rejecting with his silence, his stubbornness, because she had yearned for so long for the one thing he seemed determined to throw away.
He reached to turn on the radio, but she stilled his hand before he could touch the dial.
‘Can I ask you something?’ she said. ‘Something personal.’
His gaze flicked to hers, the frown making her certain he could guess what she was going to ask, but then to her surprise he replied, ‘Sure, I guess you’ve earned the right.’
It was a strange thing to say. But she swallowed the foolish leap of hope. This wasn’t about her, about them.
‘Did something happen to you as a little boy, that alienated you from your siblings?’
‘How the hell did you know about—?’ He stopped dead, but she could hear the defensiveness, and she’d heard enough to realise Isabella had been spot on.
‘Isabella told me,’ she said carefully as his knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. ‘They know something happened, something devastating, because you changed and they think that’s why it’s so painful for you to spend time with them,’ she rambled on, scared of making things worse, but much more scared of not doing what she could to fix this rift. ‘She says Ari and Matty tried to talk to you before about it, when your mother died, but you brushed them off. But they don’t understand why you can’t talk about it now.’
‘It’s not important,’ he said, his gaze fixed on the road ahead as they drove through the park.
It was a ridiculous thing to say, even he had to know that.
‘How can it not be important,’ she said gently, ‘when it’s stopped you from being with people who love you so much?’
He said nothing for a long time, the muscle in his jaw clenching and releasing, as he drove the car into the underground garage. She waited, patient but determined. This was incredibly hard for him, she got that, but maybe if he could talk about it to her, whatever it was would release him from its clutches.
He switched off the ignition and sat with his head bowed, his breathing ragged. At last he turned to her, but what she saw in his eyes made no sense. Not sadness, not fear, not even the guarded tension she had become used to today, but guilt and shame, naked and unguarded for once. ‘They wouldn’t love me quite so much if they knew the truth,’ he said. ‘And neither would you.’