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“Fine.” I was licking my spoon when a thought came to my mind. “Your mother.”
“No.” He shot me down quickly.
“Why? Because you’re hunting her down?”
“Why not Bella?”
My eyebrow twitched and my eyes narrowed, but he just stared back. He looked as if he was saying he was willing to fight me.
“My sister hasn’t done anything great. Your mother, on the other hand…and not just her. The whole Giovanni family is respected still in Italy, and even here. The family that grew from nothing to conquer the whole world. Naming her after your Italian side…”
“And yours?” He was no longer listening to me. “The Orsini family is just as respected. Pick something from your family tree and then it would be like our families joining.”
I knew this moment would come someday, but I never thought it would happen like this. I had daughter. My daughter. Both of her parents were here, both of them loved her…she was a product of that love and that warmed parts of me I didn’t think I had. So I faced him and said, “I lied to you, I’m not an Orsini.”
ETHAN – AGE 24
Chicago, Illinois
Sunday, March 10th
My mind went blank. I didn’t understand.
“What?”
“I’m not an Orsini,” she repeated, placing her bowl back on the tray. “Not by blood, anyway.”
“You were adopted?” No, I had seen her mother and her sisters, and she looked like them.
She nodded and her grey eyes never left my own. I could tell she was trying to keep her voice void of emotion. “I told you my mother didn’t want me. That was true. But it wasn’t because she and my adoptive father don’t love each other. She was raped. You noticed how I barely showed until the last month or two…it was kind of the same for my mother. She had taken the morning after pill. She did everything she thought she was supposed to do. And then I think she started to lie to herself. She was in denial about being pregnant, she hoped it was her husband’s…but deep down she knew. When you look at us, you notice my grey eyes. So, my adoptive father knew. They kept me, but my mother had deep scars from that moment…which she often took out on me. Apparently, I have the same eyes as the man who attacked her. So, often, she would see me and try to kill me. Smothering, choking, poisoning, drowning, everything short of putting a gun to my head and firing. My mother tried to kill me many times, and everyone would just tell me to try to understand and keep this disgrace quiet for the sake of the family.”
“So you did?”
She nodded again. “What else could I do? I was child. The adults told me to be quiet and accept it, that she didn’t really mean it. So I did. Teachers started noticing the bruises, and I learned how to play with makeup to hide them, to protect her. Later I chose to go to military school. Anyway, long story short, sometimes I feel like a fraud calling myself Calliope Orsini…the Orsini name is a fake shield in my mind. I don’t want to remember all of that when I look at my own daughter. So like I said, we are picking from your family. A family she belongs to without any doubts.”
That was that. She drank her water and tried to get up. Getting up off the bed, I walked around to her side and gave her my hand.
She took it and held on to the IV pole. “I’m fine going to the bathroom. Stay with her, I don’t want her to be alone.”
Ignoring her, I helped her walk to the bathroom. She didn’t fight me. She didn’t have the strength to. I opened the door and she went inside, holding on to the wall rails. Closing the door behind her, I leaned against it as I stared at our daughter, this innocent child who now had a death grip on my heart. I wondered what I would do for her…how far I would go for her. It reminded me of my own mother. I felt her…not physically, but in my memories, all of her hugs, all the time she held ran her hands through my hair. Her yelling, us swimming together, her teaching me how to shoot…her yelling. My father teaching me to drive, him giving me lectures at the most awkward and uncomfortable moments…him saving me from my mother’s yelling. All the times he’d just sit with me, said nothing, just sat down and did his work next to me. It made me laugh and smile until I remembered her death…his death…their fake deaths. I could feel that pain coming back but I pushed it back as I always did.
But my pain is nothing in comparison to what Calliope had pushed down. I didn’t want to think of what her childhood must have been like because then I’d want kill her whole family…and they were now my family by fucking connection.
“Come up with something?” she asked when she opened the door, and this time I didn’t have to guide her. She reached out to me to hold onto my arm.
“Yes.” I helped her back onto the bed, lifting the tray and setting it over her.
“Really?”
I nodded. “Giovanna A. Callahan.”
She grinned. “Giovanni…Giovanna. I like it. I’ll tell my family her name is Giovanna Siena Orsini-Callahan? Siena after my grandmother.”
“I want to keep some family traditions. They can add as many names as they want. Siena, Orsini…whatever. But her name is Giovanna A. Callahan.”
“Athena, then.”
Right on cue, Giovanna woke up, starting to cry. Calliope reached over, picking her up from the bassinet.
