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Completely perplexed by his reaction, Rose put down her napkin and said hesitantly, ‘Zac...?’
She got up and walked over to where he stood, facing out over the countryside. Dusk gathered around them, lengthening the shadows. Rose felt as if she’d intruded onto something intensely private.
She looked up at his strong profile. And then, before he even said anything, it clicked. This was why he looked so at ease here and spoke fluent Italian. He was from here. This was his land. She could see it now, stamped indelibly onto his proud features. That aquiline Italian profile. She said faintly, ‘They’re your relations... But how...?’
A muscle pulsed in Zac’s jaw, but eventually he said, ‘My father. He was Luca Valenti. Born and raised here in the village. He worked in the local mine until he emigrated to New York when he was twenty-five, looking for a better life.’
Rose frowned, not comprehending. ‘But your parents... I mean your mother...she is—’
He cut in, looking at her now, and said almost accusingly, ‘She is not who you think. Jocelyn Lyndon-Holt is my grandmother—not my mother.’
‘But how?’ Rose couldn’t get her head around it. She caught Zac’s dry look and said, ‘Well, obviously your mother must have been...’
‘Her daughter. Her only child. Simone Lyndon-Holt.’
Rose realised then that she’d never really given much thought to why Zac had taken the name Valenti; she’d gone to work at the Lyndon-Holt house shortly after he’d left and had vague memories of the press assuming at the time that he’d plucked it from obscurity. But it was his name—his actual real name.
‘But how did your mother meet your father if he was—?’
‘An immigrant?’ Zac supplied with a bitter tone.
Rose half shrugged and nodded. She was the daughter of immigrants, so she hadn’t meant it like that.
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, clearly reluctant to speak of this. But Rose was too greedy for information to tell him he didn’t need to go on. This, she was just discovering, was her child’s heritage. Its real heritage.
‘My mother met my father when he was hired as a labourer to work on the grounds at the house. She was twenty-one and promised in marriage to a man from a family of similar standing. She was ripe for rebellion after a lifetime of being brought up in that mausoleum and, after meeting my father, she broke off her engagement.’
There was no mistaking the bitterness in Zac’s tone now, and his mouth was a thin line. Rose suspected that he wasn’t just talking about his mother’s experience and her heart squeezed.
‘By all accounts their affair was passionate, and my father encouraged my mother to elope with him—which she did. They got married in upstate New York, and by the time they came back she was pregnant with me.’
Rose was aware of her heart pounding with dread, wanting to know more but not wanting to know at the same time, because it wouldn’t be good. How else had Zac ended up with his grandparents posing as his parents?
‘When they returned to confront my grandparents—to present them with a fait accompli—my grandfather, who was still alive at that point, told my mother she was dead to them and that if she crossed the threshold again they would ensure my father would be run out of the country, exposed for not having a proper working visa. Needless to say they cut her off from her inheritance and all funds.’
Zac glanced at Rose for a moment before looking away again.
‘My father wanted to bring my mother back here, to Italy, but her pregnancy was difficult so they had to stay in New York to ensure her safety—and mine.’
Rose wondered if that was why Zac had made sure she had access to doctors and a hospital, and why he’d been concerned about her well-being earlier.
He was continuing. ‘Things got fraught. My father was under more and more pressure to earn money to support them. He was working four jobs at one point, and it was while he was on a construction job that he was involved in an accident.’
Rose sucked in a breath.
‘He was taken to hospital, but he had no ID with him and he was barely conscious. He slipped into a coma and it was a week before my mother was able to track him down. The shock made her go into early labour, and by the time I was born—a month prematurely—my father had died.’
Rose put her hand up to her mouth, as if that could stifle the shock she felt.
Zac’s voice was leached of all expression now. ‘My mother was destitute by then—cut off from her parents and qualified to do nothing except be a social butterfly. In her desperation she did the only thing she felt she could do. She took me to them and asked them to take care of me. They told her that they would only take me in and care for me under one condition: if she left and never returned.’
‘Oh, God... Zac...’
But he continued relentlessly. ‘All they cared about was having a male heir. My grandmother had only had one child—my mother—and my grandfather had never forgiven her for that, so they seized the opportunity to restore the balance when they could.
‘My mother left that day and a week later her body was washed up on the shores of the East River. My parents had kept her disappearance quiet, somehow, and her death barely got a mention in the papers. The scandal was simply absorbed into Manhattan society and hidden—like countless other scandals. I was accepted as their child...as if it was entirely normal for a couple in their late forties to emerge with a baby out of nowhere. As I grew up I heard talk of an older sister who had committed suicide, but I never knew who she really was.
‘Years later, on the morning I was due to get married, a woman came to visit me—she was an old friend of my parents...someone who had lived in the same building as them. She’d been pregnant at the same time as my mother... She told me everything, and also that my mother had gone to her after she’d left me with my grandparents, torn apart but knowing that she’d done the only thing she could to ensure my security and future. She’d made this friend of hers promise to keep an eye on my progress, and one day, when she felt the time was right, to tell me the real story. When I confronted my grandparents they didn’t even deny it.’
