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Santino opened the trunk. “Want to stay the night? I can come back once it’s dark and have a look around.”
It was a tempting offer. But was I getting too paranoid? Their grounds were well maintained. The few animals I’d spotted looked well fed. And the berries were a legitimate business. Maybe I’d never find out what was going on.
I needed to let this rest and concentrate on what mattered: finding a job and convincing Everleigh to marry me. I wanted to make her mine completely. There would never be another for me. This I knew with absolute certainty. And it was time to make it official.
A chicken squawked, and then something dropped to the ground. “Dios mio,” a voice called out.
I looked up at an older woman, her hands clutched to her chest, broken eggs all around her. She was staring at me with wide eyes, trying to say something but no words coming out.
The woman from the shop rushed past me. “¿Qué pasó?”
They had a whispered conversation, and then the younger woman’s head snapped up.
Santino shifted from foot to foot, his eyes flitting around the grounds as if he expected someone to jump out from behind the goat.
The older woman approached on shaky legs, supported by the shopgirl, who had an arm around her.
When they reached me, I could see tears in her eyes. She didn’t stop until she was almost toe-to-toe with me. Reaching out, she cupped my face.
Santino made a move to rip her arm right off me, but I held up my hand. “No. It’s okay.”
She must have been in her seventies, and the last thing I wanted was to give her a heart attack.
“You’re Eliana’s boy.”
Her English was accented but clear. Though it wasn’t so much her familiar voice that threw me but that she knew my mother. “I am. Did you know her?”
She started crying. “She was my sister. I’ve been waiting to see you again for a long time. I’m Moni, your aunt.”
I didn’t know my mother had any siblings. She had died when I was seven, and Maurizio never talked about her. It was as if she’d been erased from my life.
“My cousin sometimes sent me pictures of you. She told me what a great man you turned out to be. Nothing like your father. But she hasn’t been in touch in at least two years.”
I was reeling from the revelation of not only having an aunt but also another relative. “I didn’t know I had any family left.”
“Neither did Maurizio. But Mariana was smart. She married young, changed her name, moved away. And when her husband died and then Eliana, she knew she had to take care of the scared little boy my sister left behind. She always looked out for you as much as she could while that bastard was around.”
She spit on the ground when she said the last word.
Mariana taking care of me made so much more sense now. “He’s dead. And Mariana is safe in Georgetown.”
She made the sign of the cross, and a smile split her face. She had the same dimple in her right cheek as my mom. The same one I had. I remembered my mom very little, but I remembered that. I had one photo of her that I always kept close to me. It was of her holding me as a toddler, a big smile on her face.
“Did you…?” Moni trailed off, leaving the question unspoken.
I shook my head.
Nodding, she stepped back. “Doesn’t matter who it was. He deserved it. Most evil man I’ve ever met. When Eliana first went out with him, I told her he was bad news. But she wouldn’t listen. Told me she was in love.” A wistful look came over her face. “And in the end, she was too scared to leave.”
She turned to who I recognized must be her daughter. “Where are my manners? Ava, close up the shop and grab some cake. We need to celebrate.”
Moni led us to a table in the yard behind the house, surrounded by apple and cherry trees.
Santino took a reluctant seat, still not believing we were completely safe. It was hard to erase a lifetime of conditioning. I knew he wanted to poke around the house and then stand guard instead of eating cake and drinking lemonade.
But that was what we ended up doing. Even Santino couldn’t stop himself from eating two slices.
Ava kept stealing glances at him. Santino ignored her, but I knew he was aware of everything going on around him. He’d have noticed her attention straying to him.
