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He made a growling sound of agreement. “Add into the mix the fact my aunt was only sixteen years old,” he placed his coffee cup down on the bench behind her, but made no effort to disentangle their fingers. “Yaya was heartbroken.”
“I can imagine.” She frowned. “So what happened?”
“With what?”
“I presume your dad sorted himself out once he got married, had kids?”
“Why?”
She lifted her shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“They didn’t. They continued their lifestyle. If anything, once they became parents, it got worse, as though they were trying to outrun responsibility at every opportunity.”
“Your mother?”
“The same as my father.”
Sadness squeezed something deep inside of Isabella.
“We were taken away from them. I was only a baby – I don’t remember anything of life before Gianfelice and Yaya brought us to Villa Fortune, but my brothers and cousins have told me enough.”
Isabella’s eyes were wide like saucers.
“My cousin Luca was found walking two miles from their mansion on Ibiza one morning. He was barefoot, naked, and though he was only young, he just kept saying, ‘ho fame, ho fame’ over and over.”
She frowned. “Ho fame? I’m hungry?”
“Right. Apparently while our parents were excellent at making sure they had enough cocaine in the house to see their friends through a couple of nights, they were not so good at remembering to feed us regularly.”
“Oh, Gabe.” Tears sparkled in her eyes. “That’s terrible.”
He winced. “Like I said, I don’t remember any of this. It’s only what I’ve been told.”
“I suppose that’s lucky.”
“Yes.” His voice was a deep growl.
“And now? Are your parents still –,”
“Alive? Yes.”
Her smile was lopsided. “I was going to say ‘living like that’.”
“Oh. Yes. So far as I know.”
They were quiet a moment, but it was a quietness that was full of contemplation. Eventually, Gabe broke it and Isabella was immeasurably glad, glad that his disclosure was willingly given, not drawn from him almost against his will. “Gianfelice and Yaya learned from what they deemed to be their mistakes. Where they had indulged their own children’s every whim, and allowed them to be lazy and spoiled, we were raised with the same work ethic as my grandfather. We took nothing for granted. We had billion-dollar trust funds but were given very little in our day to day lives. We made do with hand-me-down clothes for years, and each of us had jobs around the house that we had to do in order to earn a small amount of pocket money.”
?
??And you don’t approve of that?”
“On the contrary, I’m grateful to my grandparents for finding a way to raise us with a ‘normal’ attitude to money despite what we would one day control. I know Yaya thinks about her children every day. She is a beautiful woman, kind-hearted and with a ready smile, but there is something in the depths of her eyes that I see whenever we’re together. Her grief, and regrets, are constant.”
Isabella sighed softly. “That’s really sad. I’m so sorry for her.”
“I am too.”
“She’s going to miss you this Christmas.”
