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‘The press has always had an interest in the Romanos, as you well know.’ She gave a tired shake of her head. ‘A couple of years ago, there were some rumours. Your father and Roberto had been seen in a restaurant in Florence and also dining at La Fiordelise a couple of times. I couldn’t bear it, Dante. I told him to stop the rumours in their tracks. As well as that, David told me he could no longer stay on the sidelines; he wanted marriage too...’
Dante frowned as his mother continued.
‘My children were grown and I decided it was time for me, so I told your father I wanted a divorce. I asked him to lie one more time for me, to take the blame, but in a more familiar way...’
‘An affair with his PA?’
She nodded. ‘I did not know, because he kept so much from me, that at the time your father was undergoing tests. He had found out he was dying. Had I waited, we could have avoided so much humiliation with the divorce, so much drama—’ She stopped herself from what she was about to say, but it was the same words that had been said on the day Rafael had died.
And Dante could well guess what she meant. ‘Had you waited, you would have been his widow?’
He thought of his mother fighting to still be allowed to attend the ball, of her asking the judge to be allowed to still keep the Romano name.
At the time he had thought it was because she’d wanted the same name as her children, but he had never dwelled on it.
‘I don’t doubt that it was hell for you and my father, and that you had many reasons to stay and for the marriage to appear to work. But those reasons surely ended close to a decade ago...’
‘The arrangement worked,’ Angela maintained. ‘Until David insisted on marriage and brought things to a head.’
‘Yet you and Signor Thomas still haven’t married,’ Dante pointed out, and watched as his mother pressed her lips together, possibly glad now her son had suggested that David leave as he made a very pertinent point. ‘The fact is that you love being a Romano and you didn’t want it to end.’
‘I earned that name!’ Angela snarled.
And all the trappings and kudos that came with it, he reflected. Oh, his father might not have loved her in the traditional sense but he had assured Angela an extremely prominent and privileged life.
Dante had always thought it would be Mia clinging to every contested detail of the divorce settlement, but he could see now that it was more likely that it had been his mother. He had often wondered if guilt had made his father so generous; now he was sure that was the case. And he wondered too how life might have been if his mother had been prepared to break the status quo once her children were grown, end the marriage, and let his father live his true life.
While he doubted he would ever get those answers from his mother, who loved to put herself in a flattering light, there was one more thing he badly needed to know. ‘How did he get Mia to agree?’
‘Money,’ Angela said, as if the answer was an obvious one, and Dante’s jaw tightened. He loved his mother, but she had an arrogant air to her. He did not like that part of her, and he saw it far more clearly at this moment.
‘How did he get her to agree?’
‘She was desperate,’ Angela said. ‘About to lose her job, but you know your father, he would always fall for a sob story...’
‘Stop!’ Dante said. ‘Stop being so cruel when you speak about her. I mean it. I will call you out on it every time. I don’t give a damn if my father was gay, and I don’t care if you slept with every tutor in my school, but I will not let you speak about her like that again in my presence. You might feel that disparaging her is part of the act, but to me that was unnecessary and cruel...’ He took a breath to calm himself for there was more he needed to know. ‘And what do you mean, a sob story?’ It was just so unlike the Mia he knew.
‘She told him how her parents had just been killed...’ Dante frowned. From the way Mia had carried herself, as awful as it was, he had assumed it had happened years ago, but his curiosity turned to horror as his mother spoke on. ‘She told him that her brother had spinal injuries and had had no travel insurance...’
‘Her brother has spinal injuries?’
‘Yes, she had just got him back to the UK from the States. Your father said he would speak to her manager and say that she should keep her job, but Mia admitted she could not do it any more. She could not hold down a job. She was having nightmares after being trapped in the car with their bodies...’
Dante went cold. ‘Mia was in the accident that killed her parents?’ The mere glimpse Mia had been trapped in a car with her family appalled him.
He thought of her standing in the yard, pleading with him not to leave her alone, and it made him glance out to the black night sky. He stood abruptly.
‘Where are you going?’ Angela asked.
‘To Luctano,’ Dante said. ‘To Mia.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
ITWASAhellish flight back to Luctano and though the pilot dodged the storm cells it was very turbulent.
But it was not the rain or the heavy clouds that had his stomach lurching, it was his own self-castigation. His own impatience and assumptions. He had assumed her brother had not come to the funeral because Mia had secrets she didn’t want shared. Just as he had decided her marriage to his father had been for selfish gain.
Mia was right, Dante realised. He did not know her.
