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“I know they were in love,” he said. “I know they spoke often, and talked about how they could ever be together. I know your mother told your father, and told him she wanted a divorce, that she wanted to be with Vitalo. I know your father was devastated.”
“How do you know?” She asked, standing and clinging to his arm. “Tell me.”
“I made it my business to know,” he snapped, but there was hurt and fear and upset in his face.
“Why? I don’t understand.”
His eyes sparkled, blue and green, when they met hers. “Because, cara, I had no way of protecting my interests, with your mother. She held all the cards and she loved to lord that over me. You don’t know how often she’s threatened to leave me, broke and alone like I was when we met.”
Nausea was back, cresting through her. “So what? You wanted to blackmail her, or something?”
He had the decency to look ashamed. “I did. At first. When I thought she would tire of me and move on. But instead, we fell in love… Or I thought we did.”
She wanted to say she didn’t believe him. She wanted to defend her mother and Vitalo, she wanted to defend them with all the breath in her body, but she was no fool, and there were facts in play that demanded some examination.
“I can’t understand why she would marry you,” she said, finally, thoughtfully.
His smile was a grimace. “To make him jealous,” he said, shaking his head. “She hoped he would interfere. That he would hate the idea of her marrying again so much he’d finally commit to her.”
Bella swept her eyes shut, remembering the darkness of Vitalo’s mood on the night of the wedding. It made sense. All of it.
“And then I got pregnant,” she whispered, holding her stomach. “But he didn’t have to marry me…” She dipped her head into her hands. “Why would he do that?”
“I can think of any number of reasons, cara,” Lorenzo spoke with true sympathy. “The least generous of which is to pain your mother. To pay her back for marrying me.”
“No way. He’s not capable of that.”
“Or perhaps it was to ensure he would be close to her. How convenient to be in the same family as your married lover…”
Disgust rolled through her gut and bile rose into her mouth. “Don’t,” she pleaded. “I can’t believe that.”
“I am sorry, with all my heart, to be the bearer of this news, but it is as I say. She slept here about a month ago.”
Bella counted back the dates, and she knew when that would have been – right before he came and proposed to her. The night he’d found out about the baby. “How do you know?”
“I had an investigator,” he said without apology.
Her eyes swept shut. It could have been harmless. And yet…
She spun away from him, vomiting once more, her body wracked with sickness, her head spinning. And suddenly, she was adrift, nothing and no one anchoring her to anything she could recognize. All of the markers in her life were awash; she couldn’t make head nor tail of any of them.
“How did you get here?”
He frowned. “I flew.”
“Not to Athens. Here. To Vitalo’s.”
“A cab.”
She nodded. “I need… I want to…” What? To run away?
She shook her head, and when she closed her eyes she saw Vitalo and her heart panged and tears filled her eyes. She couldn’t – wouldn’t – do that to him. She wouldn’t flee without giving him a chance to explain. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I don’t know what’s true and what’s not, but I’m sorry if my mother has used you, as you say. I truly hoped you would make each other happy…”
His expression shifted and he shook his head. “I fell in love with her,” he said, shrugging, “Knowing what kind of woman she was.”
The words were like arrows in Bella’s side, because she knew what kind of woman Kat was, too. She’d tried to deny it, all her life, loyalty keeping her silent, leading her to try to see the best in her mother.
But there was a vanity and insecurity in Katerina Howard that required constant adoration. Why else would she have pushed both of her daughters away when they became teenagers, and beautiful in their own rights? Bella was sent to Spain and Sophia to Abu Faya and all the while she what? Slept with Vitalo?
