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When we walked into the office, I was taken aback to see an extremely thin, worn-out woman sitting in one of the chairs in front of the desk. She was thin and pale. In the corner of the room hovered a teenage girl, who I presumed must be the daughter.
“I’m told you need to see me,” said Gabriel, getting right to the point. He sat down in the chair behind the desk, while I stood next to him and Jacob leaned against the window with one hand in his pocket.
“Hello, Gabriel,” said the older woman.
“Have we met before?” my brother asked her.
“Yes, we have, but it was many years ago.”
Gabriel frowned as he concentrated on her face. “You do look familiar somehow,” he said slowly. “But I’m sorry, I don’t recall.”
The woman gave a small laugh. “I didn’t expect you to. You were just a young boy back then. And I look very different from how I looked then. My parents were Luigi and Giuseppina Pugliesi.”
The room fell silent for a few long moments. “You’re Carmela Pugliesi?” I asked, vaguely remembering the girl who had been promised to the Greco family as part of a deal for an alliance—an alliance, if I remembered correctly, fell apart after a matter of months.
“Yes, I am. Well, I was until I became Carmela Greco.” According to the gossip at the time, she had been thrown out by her husband less than a year after her marriage because she had cheated on him.
“That’s why you look familiar,” stated Gabriel. “You look like your father.”
“Yes, everyone always did say that I took after him.”
“You don’t look well, Carmela,” said Gabriel, stating what was obvious to all of us.
“I’m not. My heart is failing, and the doctors can do no more for me. I was born with a defect and have had surgery, but my heart can’t take the strain any longer. I am on the list for a heart transplant, but I’m far down the list and it’s too late now—my heart won’t hold out much longer.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” replied Gabriel quietly.
“You’re probably wondering why I’m here today. This is Arabella,” she said, gesturing to the girl with her. “She is my only child…and she is your half-sister.”
I shot a look toward the young girl who had moved out from the shadow of the back wall and now hovered protectively by her mother’s side. I looked at her properly for the first time since I’d entered the room. She had black hair and blue eyes, eyes which were so like Nancia’s—exactly the same shape and exactly the same shade of the dark blue.
“Mom,” exclaimed the girl. “You said we were coming here because you needed to see an old family friend. You didn’t say we were going to seethem.”
“Sweetheart, I knew you wouldn’t bring me here today if I told you the truth.”
She looked back at my brother and me. “Once I pass, Bella will have no family left except for you. I know your father is dead now and so she’ll be safe to come here if she ever needs help.”
“Mom, no, you know I’ll be able to manage by myself. I’ve taken care of us for the last year, haven’t I?”
“It’s not that, sweetheart. You know that.” She looked back at us. “My husband threw me out just after Bella was born. It was obvious that she wasn’t his daughter because she had been born too early. We had only been married for six months by then.” She looked us straight in the eye. “Your father raped me before I was married.”
After a moment of stunned silence, Gabriel found his voice. “Did your husband demand a paternity test?”
Carmela gave a harsh laugh. “He didn’t have to. I told him the truth. I knew better than to lie to him. He was a brutal husband even before he discovered Bella wasn’t his.”
“What happened then?” I asked.
“He threw me out. The alliance between him and the Società had already broken down a couple of months earlier. I came back to my parents, but they refused to take me in. I told them I had been raped and by whom, but that made no difference to them. I’d conceived a child out of wedlock, and I was a disgrace in their eyes.”
“What did you do?”
“I had nowhere to live, no job and no qualifications. I sold my wedding and engagement rings and got enough money to pay a deposit and rent on a room in a rundown house. Then I got a job as a waitress in a diner, doing as many shifts as I could—the graveyard shift, double shifts, whatever I could to make ends meet.”
“What about Bella?” I asked, looking at the girl and wondering how old she was.
“The other people in the house helped look after Bella. And I looked after their children in return when they were working. We were lucky. It was still hard, but I’ve never regretted it. We’ve had a better life than if I had stayed with my husband.”
I thought about her parents. They had both since died and Carmela had been their only child. Luigi Pugliesi had been a sanctimonious asshole, so hearing about how he had treated Carmela shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. “It sounded like it was very tough for you,” I murmured in sympathy.
