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“True,” she murmured. “But at eleven, you’re still learning who you are to be in the world, how to be.”
“Yes.”
“Was she ill?”
“It was an accident. She was in America, visiting her parents—I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned that she was American?”
Maddie shook her head. She was surprised, for the simple reason that Rocco was so incredibly Italian.
“I was raised here,” he explained as if reading her mind. “My mother spoke Italian at home with us, cooked Italian meals, did everything she could, really, to be a Santoro.”
Maddie looked at him thoughtfully. “You say that as though it’s a bad thing?”
“Not at all. But it is a ‘big’ thing. The Santoro family is—has long been—wealthy and influential. She was marrying a version of Italian royalty, and I suppose she wanted to show she belonged.”
Sympathy softened Maddie’s lips into a frown. “Was she happy?”
“I was a child,” he shrugged. “It’s hard to say. My memories are that she was, yes. Absolutely. I recall my father worshipping her, and her laughing a lot. But I was a boy, as I said, and I saw things through that lens. I was always busy with something or other—I didn’t give my parents a lot of thought. Until she died, and he withdrew.”
Maddie shivered. “Withdrew how?”
Rocco, however, was in his own world, reliving the past, perhaps. “He began to drink, heavily. To date woman after woman after woman after woman. To parade them around the house, uncaring for what we thought. I was so angry, Maddie. So angry at him for letting these women into my mother’s bed, into my mother’s home. So angry with him for drinking to the point he was in a stupor, so angry with him for not being there, to talk to us about our mother, to try to keep things normal.”
“And did you try to keep things normal?” she asked gently because she knew that he did.
“I tried,” he muttered.
“But there was only so much you could do.”
His expression was taut, and somehow, she knew that he didn’t believe her—that he wasn’t mollified by her words. Rocco Santoro carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. He didn’t believe he was enough, that he had ever done enough. It was a moment of blinding clarity, that drove home for her the importance of this real estate development. It wasn’t about money, it wasn’t even about success, as he’d claimed. It was about validation. The ability to make up for what he perceived were his failings then.
“You were only a boy,” she said. “It wasn’t your responsibility to keep the train on the tracks.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“No. That was your father’s job. Your aunt and uncle’s.”
Then, he smiled, an instinctive, automatic response that changed his whole face, driving away the grief. “My aunt and uncle cannot be faulted. As much as my father would allow it, they stepped into the breach.”
“Your uncle and father were brothers, you said?”
He dipped his head in silent agreement.
“When you say, ‘as much as he would allow’?”
“My father was a proud man. He didn’t feel it was anyone else’s job to raise us.”
“Even when he had given up on doing so himself?”
Rocco’s features tightened in an expression of surprise.
Maddie’s hand flew to her mouth, pressing there to suppress a sound of regret. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Rocco shook his head once. “You’re right, though. And too damned perceptive.”
“It was rude of me. And it doesn’t make any allowance for the fact that your father was grieving too.”
Rocco’s lip twisted cynically. “Yes, he was grieving, in his own way. It took me a long time to understand that.”
