An Inheritance of Shame(21)

She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t change anything.’

‘I still want to know.’

They ate in silence for a moment, and Lucia felt tension tauten inside her. She might have been the mother of Angelo’s child, but she wasn’t—and never had been—anything else to him. It stung that the only reason he’d sought her out now, had spoken to her again at all, was because he wanted to know about Angelica. And even though part of her was gratified and even glad he wanted to know about their daughter, another part shrank back in desolation that he didn’t care about her.

Still she yearned. Still her stubborn, stupid heart insisted on wanting, on hoping, even when she knew there was no point. No chance.

‘Did you try and tell me?’ he asked after a long silence, his tone still neutral. ‘When you found out you were pregnant?’

‘I tried to try,’ she answered quietly. ‘I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t want you to feel guilty or like I’d trapped you into something, but—’ She hesitated, and his mouth twisted.

‘But you were afraid I wouldn’t believe you? Or come back for you?’

She lifted her chin and made herself meet his hooded gaze directly. ‘Would you have?’

‘For my child? Yes.’ He spoke with complete certainty, and Lucia nodded slowly. For his child. Not for her, never for her. She’d never been enough of a reason for him to stay, or even to consider taking her with him. It was that realisation, she knew, that had kept her from writing. She had never wanted to be his burden.

‘In any case,’ she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact, ‘I wrote a dozen different letters and never sent them. I kept telling myself I had time, and then—and then it didn’t matter any more.’ She swallowed past the lump that had formed in her throat. Even now it hurt. Especially now.

‘I wish,’ Angelo said quietly, ‘I could have been there. I would have liked to have seen her, to have held her.’

Lucia stared down at her plate, her half-eaten meal blurring in front of her. She knew if she blinked the tears would fall, and she didn’t want to cry. Not in front of Angelo. Not when every word he said seemed to hurt her in so many different ways.

He wanted to have been there for their baby, not for her. And even though that knowledge hurt, a far worse pain lanced through her at how easily she could imagine him cradling their daughter, loving her. How much of her still yearned for a life that had never been hers—or theirs.

‘She looked just like she was asleep,’ she said, her eyes still on her plate. She cleared her throat, the sound unnaturally loud in the sudden stillness. ‘I held her for a little while.’ She blinked, touched the corner of her eye where a telling moisture had appeared, averting her face so Angelo wouldn’t see.

Still she didn’t think she’d fooled him.

‘Let’s walk,’ he said, almost roughly, and rose from the table. Lucia looked up, blinking rapidly, and then followed him down the twisting staircase that led to the beach.





CHAPTER SIX



THE WIND OFF the sea was a sultry caress of her skin, the sand soft and still warm under her bare feet. Lucia dabbed at her eyes again, took a deep breath as she wrested her emotions under control. Her composure, her sense of control, was the only thing of value that she had, and she clung to it.

He walked a little ahead of her, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, the wind blowing the T-shirt tight to his body so she could see the powerful, sculpted muscles of his chest and abdomen.

‘And afterwards?’ he asked after they’d walked for several minutes, the waves washing onto the sand by their feet. ‘Was there…was there a funeral?’

‘Yes.’ She spoke with matter-of-fact flatness, her only defence against the undertow of emotion that threatened to suck her down into its destructive spiral. She hadn’t talked of this in so long; she hadn’t even allowed herself to remember. Her pregnancy had been a source of shame, so that even her daughter’s death had felt like a forbidden grief, not to be spoken of, not to be mourned. More than one woman in the narrow streets of Caltarione had told her she should be thankful Angelica hadn’t lived. Lucia had never replied to this repellent sentiment, but everything in her had burned and raged—and now, under the onslaught of Angelo’s questions, still did.

‘At the church in Caltarione,’ she told Angelo in that same matter-of-fact tone. ‘It was a very small service.’ Just her, the priest and a few friends of her mother who had, to Lucia’s surprise, attended with a silent, stolid solidarity. ‘She’s buried there, in a special area for stillborn babies.’ She’d used the last of the inheritance from her mother to pay for the headstone.