AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Exactly. But I didn’t know that. So I did everything they requested of me. I ignored my tendencies to obsess. I tried to be the kind of daughter I thought they wanted—’
‘And forgot whatyouwanted?’
Her shoulders sagged. ‘Exactly.’
‘What kind of daughter did they want you to be?’
‘They wanted me to be safe. I understand that now. Since I found out about the adoption. My biological mother...’
‘They wanted to keep you safe from yourself?’
She nodded.
‘But if you weren’t allowed to explore your natural personality, how could your parents—or you—know you were a risk to yourself?’
‘They didn’t. Couldn’t. But they did it because they love me.’
His chiselled jaw hardened into angles of determination. ‘If marriage wasn’t an option, what would be your choice? Would you want to be a single mother? Raise our child alone? Put it up for adoption—?’
‘Adoption?’
She thought of the lonely boy with a mother who didn’t care. She thought of her biological mother, who had given her up.
She hoped her birth mother had done it out of a kind of love, in the hope that she would find a family like the Bicks. That her daughter would be raised with love and hope as an anchor in this world. She had been lucky to have found her parents. Because the root of her childhood, and all her teenage years into adulthood, had been a constant love. Family.
No, they hadn’t got it all right, but she would work through those feelings later, with her mum and dad. All that was important to her right now was their love. And she had that. In abundance. And she wanted that for her baby. Their unexpected family.
‘Adoption would never be a choice for me,’ she said.
‘I am presenting you with what the other options would be if you chose not—’
‘I don’t want any of those options.’
‘Then whatdoyou want?’
‘I...’
Raffaele thrust back his chair, closed the distance between them, and before she could fully dispel the breath in her lungs he was on his knees before her.
‘I’m listening,’ he told her. ‘I’m not afraid of you, and you shouldn’t be afraid of yourself. Afraid to give voice to the thoughts in your head.’
‘What’s happening inyourhead?’ she asked, because she wanted to know. Wanted to know him better.
‘I want to know the answer to a different question,’ he asked.
‘Ask it.’
‘Why were you in London?’
‘To collect my adoption file from the local authority. I’d found out six months before that my parents weren’t biologically related to me. I fell—’
‘And broke your ankle?’
‘How do you know that? From your investigator?’
‘The scar.’
His head dipped to her feet and he claimed her right foot with his palm. His thumb stroked against the ugly pink scar running the span of her right ankle above the knot of the bone.
