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“Often. After I met my friend Celia, I would spend the holidays with her family.”
He was silent for a long moment. “You’ll have a family of your own someday,” he said finally.
Would she? Did she crave the fantasy more than the reality? She had so much she wanted to accomplish before then, most of all finding out who she really was. What she wanted.
“Who was your mentor?” she asked Nate. “The one you spoke of?”
“My grandfather, Giovanni. He put me through university, took me in to work at Di Sione Shipping with him.”
“Is this the same grandfather who wants the ring?”
“Yes.”
“You said before your father wasn’t a part of your life. How did you come to know your grandfather?”
“My father died in a car accident when I was ten. My relationship with Giovanni began in my late teens when he developed leukemia and needed a bone marrow transplant. None of my half siblings were a match, so my eldest brother, Alex, sought me out to see if I was. I was a match and I did the transplant. Our relationship developed from there.”
Wow. “That must have been an incredibly emotional introduction to each other.”
“It was...intense.”
“You said you weren’t close to your brothers and sisters?”
He took a sip of his champagne. Rested his glass on the railing, a distant look in his eyes. “There is too much history between us to make that possible.”
“How so?”
“A lot of complicated relationships with many layers. Sometimes it’s simply easier to leave the past in the past. To not reopen old wounds.”
She recalled the lack of a personal background in his media profiles. It had not been an accident. He was protecting a past he had distanced himself from.
What had driven his father to abandon him? What had happened to keep him and his siblings from becoming close after his father’s death when one would think it would have been the ultimate bonding experience to give his grandfather his life back?
It was an incredibly enticing train of thought to want to pursue, but she left it at that because the walls around him as he stared out into the night said that particular conversation was over.
“Giovanni is very lucky to have had you.”
The lazy, seductive bars of a Duke Ellington tune filled the silence that followed. “I think it’s the other way around,” he said finally. “But I won’t have him for much longer. His leukemia is back and this time it will kill him.”
Her stomach dropped. That was why his grandfather wanted the ring. To reclaim a piece of his past before it was all lost to him.
“Nate—” She put a hand on his arm. “Mi dispiace. I’m so sorry.”
His expression hardened. “It’s fine. I’m lucky to have had him as long as I have.”
Except it wasn’t fine. She could see just how unfine it was in the glitter of emotion that darkened his eyes. In the clench of his jaw. The way his gaze refused to meet hers. He was suffering but you would never have known it. Taking a precious memory back to his mentor, who had perhaps been the father figure he’d never known, only to watch him die.
“It’s okay,” she said quietly, “for it not to be fine.”
He spared her a glance. “What else can it be? He’s dying and there’s nothing I nor anyone can do to prevent it.”
“Talking about it might help.”
“I’ve come to terms with it.” Storm clouds gathered in his eyes. “Leave it alone, Mina.”
She did. The pieces of her enigmatic husband starting to fall into place, she finished her champagne in silence. So much loss, so much pain, and no way to express it because he considered himself the ultimate gladiator. He would never show weakness.
A Frank Sinatra tune she loved drifted out to them on the night air. Nate put his glass down and held out his hand. “So we can say we danced at least one song after all the trouble Mingmei went through.”
