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‘David and I don’t have secrets.’
‘You mean he just blindly believes every word that you say?’
His mother took in a breath and, Dante noticed, was not quite so much on her high horse as she had always been before. She walked over to her lover.
‘David,’ she purred. ‘Would you leave us, please?’
‘Very well,’ said Signor Thomas. ‘But, Angela, please call me when you have finished speaking with Dante.’ He kissed her cheek and gave her arm a squeeze and then, having nodded to Dante, walked out.
Dante waited until the door had closed, but Angela did not. ‘What on earth were you doing with Mia?’
‘Exactly what it looks like,’ Dante said, refusing to lie. ‘But I am here to ask about you and Signor Thomas. You didn’t just bump into him after the divorce, did you?’
‘Dante, stop.’
‘No,’ he said belligerently. ‘I remember he was here once when I came home. He said he was dropping off schoolwork...’ He gave a scoffing laugh. ‘It was you who broke up the marriage, wasn’t it?’
His mother had the look of a deer caught in the headlights. ‘Dante, let things rest.’
‘Lies never rest,’ Dante said. ‘They wait and regroup and return. You were having an affair all along, weren’t you?’
‘I don’t have to answer to you!’
‘Then I’ll draw my own conclusion. You have the audacity to judge me, to judge Mia, to drag Ariana into your hate fest of negativity, when all alongyouwere the one having the affair.’
‘Your father and I came to an arrangement a long time ago,’ Angela said.
‘Why involve Mia?’ Dante shot out, because he still didn’t get it.
‘Our marriage was over long before Mia.’
‘Did you ever love him?’
‘Dante, please...’
‘Do you even miss him, or was it all just an act?’ He looked at his mother, tanned from her cruise, dressed in the latest fashions with made-up eyes, and then he thought of Mia, who had admitted the marriage had been for money and been hot in his arms, and everywhere he looked his father’s memory felt besmirched. ‘The only one who actually misses the guy is...’ Dante halted.
An impossible thought had occurred in a mind going at a million miles an hour as he thought of the endless orchid pots on Roberto’s porch and the sweet scent of the arrangement at the hospital...
Mia, shaking and close to fainting, as she threw an orchid into his grave.
The family lawyer by his father’s bedside when he passed, as his new wife walked in the hospital grounds.
And Roberto, who had not missed a Romano ball since its inception, too ill that year to attend.
Depressed, the doctor had said.
Or had he been grief-stricken?
A million tiny pieces flew together and made a star then exploded again as the revelation hit. He thought of Roberto’s whisky breath and his sudden frailty, he thought of the tears in his eyes and the unkempt home.
Roberto was the only one grieving as a lover surely would.
Just when he’d thought his father could no longer surprise him, well, it would seem Rafael still could...
‘My father was gay, wasn’t he?’
Silence was his answer.
