An Inheritance of Shame(14)

She certainly didn’t feel like she had any left now. Resisting Angelo had taken everything.

Kicking open the door to her apartment Lucia discarded her sensible shoes and stripped the soiled maid’s uniform from her body. She headed towards the tiny bathroom in the back of the flat and turned the taps on the small, rather dingy tub. She sank onto the edge of the bath and dropped her head in her hands. She felt so unbearably, achingly tired, tired of pretending all the time that she was strong, that she barely cared or remembered about what happened seven years ago. Why had she insisted on this ridiculous charade of indifference? Was it simply out of pride?

But no, she knew it was not as simple a matter as that. She knew this charade was as much for her own benefit as Angelo’s. Some absurd part of her believed, or at least hoped, that if she acted like she didn’t care, she wouldn’t. If she told him it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t.

And yet it did matter. So very much. It had mattered then, and it mattered now. And while she’d convinced herself that he didn’t need to know the truth, maybe she needed him to.

The thought was both novel and frightening. She didn’t want to tell Angelo the truth of their night together, and yet as long as she kept it a secret it festered unhealed inside her soul. What if she lanced that wound, drained it of its poison and power? What if she told Angelo, not for his sake, but for her own?

Would she finally be able to put the whole episode behind her, put Angelo behind her?

If only.

She stayed in the tub until the water had grown cold and then she slipped on a pair of worn trackie bottoms and a T-shirt. After a second’s pause she took an old cardboard box from the dusty top shelf of her wardrobe, brought it out to the sofa in the living room. She didn’t take this box out very often; it felt like picking off the scab of her barely healed soul. She knew it was dangerous weakness to take it out now, when she already felt so raw, yet still she did it, unable to resist remembering.

Carefully she eased the lid off the box and looked at the few treasures inside: a scrapbook of old travel postcards she’d been given from the people whose houses she and her mother had cleaned. She and Angelo had used to make up stories about all the different places they’d travel to one day, the amazing things they would do. A single letter Angelo had written her from New York, when he’d left at eighteen years old. She’d practically memorised its few lines. A lock of hair.

She took the last out now, fingering its silky softness, a tiny curl tied with a bit of thread. She closed her eyes and a single tear tracked down her cheek. It hurt so much to remember, to access that hidden grief she knew she would always carry with her, a leaden weight inside her that never lightened; she had simply learned to limp along under its heaviness.

A sudden, hard rapping on the front door made her still, tense. The only person who ever knocked on her door was the owner of the bar downstairs, an oily man with a sagging paunch who was always making veiled—and not-so-veiled—references to what he thought he knew of her past. She really didn’t feel like dealing with him now.

Another knock sounded, this one even more sharp and insistent.

Drawing a deep breath, Lucia put the box and its contents aside. She wiped the tear from her face and looked through the fogged eyehole in the door, shock slicing straight through her when she saw who it was. No oily landlord, and definitely no paunch.

Angelo raised his hand to knock again and, her own hands shaking, she unlocked the door and opened it.

‘What are you doing here, Angelo?’

His hair was rumpled like he’d driven his fingers carelessly through it, his expression as grim as ever. ‘May I come in?’

She shrugged and moved aside. Angelo stepped across the threshold, his narrowed gaze quickly taking in the small, shabby apartment with her mother’s old three-piece suite and a few framed posters for decoration. It wasn’t much, Lucia certainly knew that, but it was hers and she’d earned it. She didn’t like the way Angelo seemed to sum it up and dismiss it in one judgemental second.

‘What do you want?’ she asked, and heard how ragged her voice sounded. ‘Or do you not even know? Because you keep trying to find me, but God only knows why.’

He turned slowly to face her. ‘God only knows,’ he agreed quietly. ‘Because I don’t.’

‘Then maybe you should just stop.’

‘I can’t.’

She shook her head helplessly, every emotion far too close to the surface, to his scrutiny. ‘Why not?’