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“Five-year-olds are resilient,” he said with the soft ruthlessness that made even the normally cheeky Guglielmo pause and rethink. “It would beniceto have you there when I meet him. It would beniceto have you set the stage. But it is not necessary, Cecilia. If I were you, I would not forget that.”
“Or what?” she demanded, wildly. “You’ll just…steal him away to Rome?”
“Yes.” His voice was a hard crack in the quiet room. “Without a second thought.”
She stared back at him, stricken. And she was his ghost, once upon a time his angel. But he didn’t let that soften him. If anything, that he had believed he cared for her all those years ago made the betrayal worse. He stared back at her, relentless.
“Mama?” The small voice came from one of the doors behind Pascal. “I heard voices.”
Pascal tensed. He watched Cecilia’s face closely. And he was sure he could see her fight back the urge to shoo the child away. To have him hide himself just a little longer, however futile the gesture.
He thought he saw something like despair in her otherworldly eyes, just a flash of it. Just enough to lodge itself inside Pascal like shame.
But then she smiled. Wide and bright as if there had never been anything in her eyes but sweetness and light.
“Come here, baby,” she said, and held out her hand. “You have a very special visitor tonight.”
Pascal held himself still enough to crack in half as he heard Dante’s surprisingly heavy footsteps move across the floor. And then he watched as the small, sturdy boy with rosy cheeks and black hair standing on end came around the side of the couch. He walked toward the fire and took his mother’s hand. Then he gazed at Pascal with sleepy eyes.
Sleepy eyes that were black like Pascal’s, with a dark rim around the irises that Pascal suspected, were he any closer, would be the precise violet shade of his mother’s.
It was like a heart attack, but it didn’t hurt. It simply…seized Pascal where he sat.
He knew this child. He could see the shape of his own face in the smaller face before him. He could see his own mother’s nose. And he could see Cecilia, too. And it had never occurred to Pascal before that children were the real ghosts, patchworks of the past made new—yet unlike the haunts of fiction, wholly uninterested in what had gone before them.
Pascal felt struck down, though he knew he still sat in the same position. He felt everything he’d felt on that field and more, because this time, his son was right in front of him.Lookingat him.
And Pascal had never understood his father or his choices. But here, now, in this huge moment that was happening so quietly and calmly despite the cacophony inside him, he understood the man even less.
Because he knew that he would fight, kill, or die for this little boy with his sleepy eyes and sulky mouth. He would not think twice.
That his father had walked away fromhisson made even less sense to Pascal now.
“Dante,” Cecilia said, her voice soft but perfectly cheerful as if this had been her plan all along, and Pascal stopped thinking about that useless, spineless man who shared nothing with him but biology. “This is your father.”
The little boy stared. He regarded Pascal solemnly. One beat, another.
“Okay,” he said.
Then he yawned, wide enough to crack his jaw, didn’t spare his mother or brand-new father a second glance, and shuffled his way back to his bed.
They married the following week by special license.
Pascal stood at the very altar where he had first discovered the existence of the child who had changed everything. Dante—hisson, he reminded himself with that same fierce pride that beat in him now like a new heartbeat—stood beside him, looking proud and overtly solemn in his best clothes.
Dante looked up at him, his little face grave. Pascal didn’t think it through. He reached down and put his hand on his child’s head, something sweet and unexpected blooming in him at the sensation. At the way the curve of his palm fit the crown of Dante’s head.
As if they had been crafted to fit together like this, interlocking pieces. Father and son.
He told himself that was why he felt very nearly emotional when the nuns who filled the pews began to sing, a hauntingly lovely song that he realized belatedly was their version of a wedding march.
Then Cecilia appeared at the head of the small church’s aisle, and Pascal…stared.
She was unhappy with him. She had made no secret of it in the days between that night when she had finally accepted reality, and now.
“What concerns me is how Dante will handle this,” she had said that night, still stiff and unfriendly at the fireplace after the child had gone back to bed. “You’ve only just sprung the fact that you’re his father on him. I’m not sure how a wedding between me and a stranger is going to strike him.”
“Children are resilient,” Pascal said with great unconcern.
