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Alessio knew all this. His father had told him on the day it had happened, and many times since, when he’d had too much to drink and been inclined to wallow in the past. “And so you left. End of story.”
“No!Notthe end of our story. I wanted you to come with me, but your father—,” she shook her head. “I couldn’t take you from him. It would have destroyed him. It wasn’t fair.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Alessio crossed his arms over his chest.
“I have missed you every day. I have watched you go from strength to strength, growing from your father’s shadow to become the force that you are: respected, brilliant, incredibly successful.”
“You think I am any of those things because you left me?”
Her face paled. “I think you have grown into the man you were destined to be. I wish—I wish I could have been there to see it.”
“You could have been,” he said with cold reserve. “But you chose to be here instead, with your new family, your new husband and son. You replaced us completely, whereas for us, for me, there was only your absence. Always your absence.”
She winced then drew in a deep breath. “I know I hurt you. I know that, to a young boy, it might have appeared that I was turning my back and leaving you, walking out on you because I didn’t love you, instead of leaving you with your father because I loved you too much to take you away. But you are a grown man now, Alessio. Surely you can see, with your adult’s eyes, that it was far more complicated and nuanced than you perceived as a child?”
He didn’t want to examine that, to turn the idea around to see if it had merit. “My perspective has changed as I’ve grown,” he agreed with a nod. “As a boy, I still had hope. Hope you would come home, that you would change your mind, hope that you would appear, as if by magic, to tuck me into bed again, to read our favourite book together.” His mother drew in a shaking breath. “Then I hoped I would forget you. That he’d forget you. That he’d meet someone else, fall in love, and I would have a new mother. I hoped I would stop missing you, stop hurting.” He stood tall, back ramrod straight as his heart and mind sank back into the past. “And finally, I did. I stopped hurting. It was as though all the warmth I once felt for you turned to ice and I came to like that. There is comfort in a lack of feeling, no?”
“No,” she responded quickly, lifting shaking fingers to her lips. “There is no comfort in that. You’re hiding, Alex.”
“Alessio,” he corrected angrily.
She flinched. “Yes, of course. I call you Alex because we decided, your father and I, that it would be a point of difference between the two of you. It’s how I think of you in my mind.”
He ignored her explanation.
“But Alessio, you are hiding from yourself, and your feelings. I acknowledge the hurt I caused you. I understand that to a boy, it must have seemed as though I simply flicked a switched and ceased to care about you. Do you think you were the only one who felt as though a part of themselves was missing? You are my son, and I had to leave you behind. I couldn’t have taken you, even if I’d wanted to.”
A muscle throbbed in his jaw. “No, you’re right. Once you had cheated on him, and become pregnant, you had no choice.”
“I loved your father, Alessio, but we were not well suited. That marriage would have destroyed all of us, if I’d stayed.”
“That’s speculative.”
“It’s what I know to be true, in here,” she pointed to her chest. “Have you ever been in love?”
Alessio responded quickly—far too quickly to give the question any actual thought. “No. Never.”
“Then you don’t know what it’s like,” she said with a sad shake of her head. “When I moved to Italy, I left my heart here. I was young, and charmed by your father, swept up into his world, impressed by his sophistication and wealth. We married within six weeks of meeting—I was still heartbroken over ending my engagement to Grant,” she said softly. “By the time I realised I’d made a mistake, I was pregnant with you. For years, I tried to make it work, but I wasn’t—,” she bit down on her lip, as if to force herself to stop talking.
“You weren’twhat, mother?”
“I wasn’t…” Her eyes searched Alessio’s beseechingly. “I wasn’t of your father’s world. I felt insufficient. At first, it was just a little self-doubt, a sense that I wasn’t quite good enough, experienced enough, smart enough, a little niggling worry that I could talk myself out of. But with each week that passed, those niggles grew. Your father worked long hours, and I was home with you. But even with you, I felt I couldn’t—nothing I did seemed right, Alessio. Some people are natural parents, but I wasn’t one of them. I came to doubt myself all the time, in all aspects of my life. I came to hate myself,” she admitted with a raw, hoarse voice. “Your father was frustrated by me. He just kept telling me to snap out of it, to look at the life I had and be grateful,” she said with a furrowed brow. “And I suppose he was right. Objectively speaking, I was very charmed.”
Alessio transferred his weight from one foot to the other, trying not to let her words inside, but finding it impossible to ignore the implication. With his limited experience of mental health, it sounded as though his mother had been severely depressed. She’d needed professional help.
“I didn’t plan to see Grant. But at my lowest ebb, we found our way back to each other. It was Grant who encouraged me to see a psychologist. Grant who would talk to me for hours at a time, while your father worked and you were at school, Grant who helped me remember that at one time, I’d been a young woman with dreams of my own.”
Alessio listened in silence.
“I loved him,” she said simply. “As much as ever. I loved your father too, but it was different. With Grant, I could be myself, and I liked the person I was with him. I knew that if I stayed with your dad, I would wither into nothing, or worse, that I might do myself harm. Alessio, can you see how desperate I was?” She moved forward, pressing a hand to his chest, needing him to understand. “I was given a second chance and I took it. Selfishly? Probably. But in that moment, I had convinced myself I was bad for you, that I could offer you nothing. I didn’t believe I would ever be the kind of mother you deserved. A father like Alessio, so dynamic and smart and charismatic, was better than a mother like me. And so, I left. But don’t think, for even one second, it didn’t break my soul in half.”
Her impassioned plea moved through him like a cyclone, reaching parts of his body that had been closed off for a long time.
“That’s why I cannot stop trying, my darling. You are my son. I left because I loved you, I have lost you all these years, but I don’t want to live without you in my life any longer. I want this enough to try, for both of us. Okay?”
Chapter11
THE KNOCK ON HER door caught Charlotte by surprise. She moved towards it quickly, aware that Dash had just drifted off to sleep, pulling it open and suppressing a gasp at the sight of Alessio there.
