“Oh Farfallina, how can I be disappointed in you when I have done same thing.”
“What?” My eyes flew open. “What do you mean? Same thing?”
She dropped her hand from my face as her lips pursed and her shoulders squared as she sat up straighter. A single tear slid down her wrinkled cheek. “I had bambina. Before your papa. In Sicily. I was a girl. Only sixteen. I had love affair with boy, Lorenzo.” Her lips curled in a sad smile, that made my heart feel like it was being hacked up by a weed whacker. “He worked on farm. It only last the summer, he leave to go to fight in war. My parents send me to stay at convent with nuns and then after I have bambina, they take her and my parents send me to America.”
“You had a baby?” I knew that’s what she’d just said, but it was so hard for me to believe.
“Sì. I have baby. I never tell no one. Not your papa, or your Nonno. No one know. Not even Lorenzo. Is secret I keep all these years.” Another tear slid down her cheek.
The pain that Nonna still carried radiated off of her. I felt it physically hit me.
I set my cup down and wrapped my arms around her. “I’m so sorry.”
“No.” She pulled away and looked at me. “Me.I’msorry. If I tell your papa, then maybe he do different. Maybe he let you keep baby.”
I had no idea if she was right. Would my father have done anything different if he’d known what his mother had gone through? I wanted to believe that he might, but deep down I doubted it.
31
MADDOX
As much asI’d wanted to call Lina into my office today after discovering that she was my daughter and that I was her father, I hadn’t. That wouldn’t be professional. Not that showing up on her doorstep unannounced and uninvited after work or hacking into her email was the height of professionalism. But these were extraordinary circumstances and as such required extraordinary measures.
I pulled up the address that was listed on her application on my phone and checked to make sure I was at the right place. It was a small brick apartment complex in the Mission District. I’d actually lived a block from there when I was starting TTT Security Solutions.
As I sat in my hybrid SUV all I could hear was the sound of my heart thudding in my head. My throat was dry but my mouth was watering as I got out and I walked up to the vibrant blue door of her building. My arms and legs were heavy, but my head felt like it was floating away. My vision was blurry but I could see everything in sharp detail.
It seemed all of my systems were malfunctioning. I might be having what people called an out-of-body experience, or this might just be the most nervous I’d ever been. I wasn’t sure.
As I searched the call box for her name, a woman with bright purple hair, green eye makeup and several face piercings opened the door and stepped out. I grabbed the painted wooden door before it could close. I stepped inside and immediately my eyes searched the entry for cameras. There were none. The lock on the front door was shabby at best. If someone hadn’t come out, I probably could have just forced it open. This place was not secure. I made a mental note to find out who the owner was and offer to upgrade the security system. Or hell, I might just buy the damn building.
Yep. That’s what I would do. If this is where Lina wanted to live, I’d make damn sure she was safe.
She was my daughter. I may not have raised her or even known she existed before last night, but that didn’t change the fact that her DNA was fifty percent mine.
The staircase was typical of an old building in the city. It was so narrow my shoulders brushed the walls and as I placed my foot on each step, it creaked telling a story of a hundred plus years of history.
Lina lived on the tenth floor and there was no elevator, so I had plenty of time to think as I made my way up. A little voice in my head said that I should have told Peyton about my discovery. She was her mother. Maybe we should be doing this together.
But after seeing how much pain Peyton was in still after the trauma she’d been through, I’d decided I needed to speak to Lina first. Alone. I needed to find out what her feelings were on her birth parents. Obviously, she was interested in meeting me. She’d been demoted to intern to work at my company.
I wanted to believe that she had good intentions. But there was a part of me, the part that had grown up in a very harsh system, that didn’t trust that was the case.
What if she hated us?
What if she’d come to my company to sabotage it?
What if she had ulterior motives?
Not that I could blame her. The circumstances of my upbringing were different than hers, obviously, but most of my life I’d spent being angry at my parents for not being there. I hadn’t let that anger go until Hannah was born. I just didn’t have any room for it in my life after that.
Whatever Lina’s intentions and feelings were, I just needed to find out and I’d deal with it.
I wasn’t thrilled that by the time I made it up to the tenth floor I was more than a little winded and feeling every bit of my thirty-five, nearly thirty-six years. I needed to get back into the gym.
After taking a moment to catch my breath, I lifted my hand and knocked. I heard some commotion behind the door before it opened.
A spoon hung out of Lina’s mouth as she held a large bowl of ice cream. She wore sweats, had her hair up in a bun and wasn’t wearing her glasses. A few things struck me all at once. First, she looked so much like Peyton with her hair up and without her glasses. Second, she must have inherited her mother’s penchant for ice cream in cold weather because it was in the forties outside. And lastly, she looked surprised to see me which meant she hadn’t checked the peephole to see who was on the other side of the door.
