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‘I’m sorry you went through all that with them.’ She ignores my quiet plea. ‘At least I had Ava, but you were alone.’
‘Not completely,’ I murmur. ‘I had my grandfather for a while.’
‘Lukas senior.’ She leans against the veranda railing and gazes across the gardens even though it’s too dark to see much. ‘You looked close in that photo.’
The one photo I allowed to remain on the company website. ‘Right.’
I thought we were.
Silence again. I chance a glance at her. In the moonlight she’s so pretty. I’ve mostly seen her with her hair tied up—a messy top knot or a high ponytail—but tonight she let her hair loose. It’s long and glossy and now I can’t take my gaze off her. I ache to snake my arm around her waist and feel that contact with her. I want it to be like the gondola when the rest of the world disappeared and there was only the two of us.
Her expression softens as she looks back at me. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t pry any further and I appreciate that restraint.
‘I was sent to boarding school in my early teens. I appreciated it, to be honest. It got me away from the week about war with Mum and Dad. They were in separate houses by then and fighting over everything, including me. But neither really wanted me, I was just a useful weapon. Weekends and holidays were still a battleground, same with school events. They’d argue over who got to attend the sports day and then either they’d both show and cause a scene or neither would show up. That’s when my grandfather stepped in.’ I found solace with him for a time.
I don’t know why I’m telling her when I can’t stand the sympathy I already see in her eyes. But I can’t stop myself babbling on because seeing my parents tonight brought it all back up. And being with Lukas and knowing I never, ever want him to feel anything like I did. Talia needs to understand why that is so we can be sure to work through this together. That’s why she needs to know, right? For Lukas.
‘He was my escape from them. I’d go there for every holiday and every other chance I could. I adored him and we bonded over the business. He taught me a lot about it—the history, his dreams for it. I knew it was tearing him apart to see my parents neglect it because they were too busy fighting each other. It became both our hope for me to turn it around in the future.’
‘And you did.’
‘Eventually, yeah.’ After he died.
She nods and we’re silent for a while.
‘I wasn’t told he had terminal cancer,’ I mumble quietly.
She jerks and looks at me again.
Even though I now know the reasons why, it still hurts. ‘It was weird at first. He stopped replying to my messages, didn’t take my calls. I got through to his secretary and was told he was too tired to see me. It was so sudden I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. But it had to be something.’ My chest tightens. ‘I wasn’t to come home to his house from school. I was to stay and study because he was busy now and didn’t have time to see me.’
‘Are you saying your grandfather ghosted you?’
‘Basically. Yeah.’ I roll my shoulders, unable to ease the tension building inside. ‘I didn’t study though. I spent the semester wondering what I’d done to make him stop—’
I break off. I don’t use the ‘L’ word. But that was how it felt—that he’d stopped loving me. He’d stopped letting me be in his life. Because I’d done something bad and I didn’t know what.
‘It was Simone who told me in the end. The media were about to break the story that Lukas, the Anzelotti patriarch, was terminal and there was going to be all-out war between my parents for the company majority. It was salacious and cruel. Simone came to the boarding school and smuggled me out, furious that I hadn’t been given any warning.’
‘Did you get to him?’
‘My parents met me. It was the one time I saw them united. They said the truth had been kept from me to protect me. They didn’t want me to be distracted from my schoolwork. They wanted me to do well in my exams.’ My fingers tighten on the railing. ‘This supposed concern from the people who’d been distracting me for years with their bitter fights.’
‘That must have been really—’
‘Shit? Yeah, it was. Because they’d done it at my grandfather’s insistence. He’d said he would change his will if they didn’t both toe the line on it.’ I glance at her and can’t get my voice above a whisper. ‘It was his call.’
‘Did you get to spend time with him before he died?’
‘No.’
‘Dain, that’s... I’m so sorry.’ Her eyes are bright. ‘So when you found I’d kept Lukas from you—’
‘Yeah, low moment.’ I don’t want to go there again. We’re past it. I half regret saying anything at all.
‘And you were angry about my not having told Ava,’ she says.
‘I felt for her.’ I clench my gut. ‘I know what it’s like to be kept in the dark. It makes you feel...incompetent.’ Rejected.
