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Well, now there was a simple question. How to find a simple answer for all she had been doing?
Nursing a bruised ego.
Discovering that she was pregnant.
Grieving the loss of that child.
Hating...
She picked up her water glass, a tumbler that bore the swirling logo of the restaurant, clearly made locally in Murano, and she wondered that, for all her vast collection, her mother had never managed to find anything near as simple or as beautiful. She studied the piece so that she didn’t have to look at the man sitting opposite. She stared at it so he wouldn’t know how much his questions unsettled her. ‘Working on my father’s property, mostly.’ The mostly was important. She wasn’t about to confess that for the first few months she’d been holed up in a friend’s one-bedroom flat in Sydney while her life lurched from one turmoil to the next.
‘What kind of property? Lily said something about wool?’
She buried the spike of resentment that rose at the mention of Lily and the farm in the same sentence. ‘Yes. Sheep and some cropping. Lucerne mainly.’ She looked around at their watery world, lined with buildings that went back at least five centuries. Some years the farm didn’t see rain, the dams dried up and the sheep turned red with dust. The last drought had lasted so long, some local kids had grown up thinking sheep were supposed to be red. ‘It’s different from here,’ she said, making a massive understatement, ‘that’s for sure.’
‘So you’re close to him, then. Your father.’
She shrugged. ‘Of course. He was the one who brought me up after Lily walked out.’ Whereas Lily, she thought, had been a some time holiday destination—her visit usually coinciding with a wedding. There’d been two more of those before her marriage to Eduardo. One to a Swiss ski school owner. Another to an Argentinian polo player. Neither of them had lasted either.
Funny, she thought, how life ran in circles sometimes.
She’d met Luca at her mother’s wedding to Eduardo. By then, aged seventeen, she’d well and truly realised that her mother’s life was as empty and pointless as they came. And by then she was hardly going to fall into bed with someone who happened to be Eduardo’s nephew, even if he was the most perfect male specimen she had ever laid eyes upon and even if he made no bones about his attraction to her...
Luca snapped a breadstick, jolting her back to the present. ‘I have trouble picturing Lily on a farm.’
‘They should never have married. I’m sure she imagined she was going to end up some rich farmer’s wife and play tennis and drink tea all day.’
‘But it didn’t turn out that way?’
She shook her head. ‘She hated it, apparently—the flies, the heat—she left when I was six months old. Just packed up and left Mitch with a baby and a hole where his heart had been.’
‘It seems—’ he hesitated a moment, as if searching for the words ‘—an unlikely match. Someone like Lily with someone who works on the land.’
‘I think their differences were what attracted them to each other. She was the original English flower, on holidays to visit an old maiden aunt. He was the rugged Australian right down to his leather workman boots and as exotic to her as she was to him. When they met at some charity event in Sydney, it was lust at first sight.’ She sighed. ‘In normal circumstances it would have run its course and they would have both gone back to their separate worlds but Lily ended up pregnant with me and before you know it they were married. Pointlessly as it turned out.’
‘You don’t approve?’
‘I don’t think an unplanned pregnancy is any reason for a marriage! Do you?’
Maybe she’d sounded too strident. Maybe her question had sounded too much like a demand because she needed him to agree with her. But across the table from her, Luca merely shrugged instead of agreeing. ‘I am Italian. Family is important to us. Who’s to say if it’s the right or wrong thing to do?’
‘Me,’ she said, knowing that if he knew—if he had only known—he would think differently. ‘I’ve lived my life knowing their marriage was futile, a disaster from start to finish. I would never do that to a child of mine. I might be Lily’s daughter, but I am not Lily!’
‘And yet here you are, still picking up after her.’
‘I’m not doing this for Lily,’ she hissed, with rods of steel underpinning her words, ‘but you threatened to bring my father into this and there is no way on this earth I am going to let you suck him into Lily’s nightmare. He’s worked hard for every cent he has and I won’t let him lose any of it on her account!’
