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And that out of her mouth, of all places, when she had supposedly done nothing but stay in her little cottage for the last few years.
"As I said, I'm managing and doing well."
With the plates in her hand, she turned to me, looking at me punitively. Who gave her the right to interfere in my affairs anyway?
"What do you have against spending half an hour with me? Talking like civilized people about anything that has nothing to do with my father or your family." As she said this, she slammed my food down on the table in front of me.
I didn't like to admit it, but everything looked good. The focaccia and the one-pot dish of vegetables and meat with a salad.
For whatever reason, I didn't expect her to even know how to cook pasta al dente.
Under her critical gaze, I picked up my fork and sank it into a piece of meat. "Are you planning to watch me the whole time?"
"I wanted to calm my nerves a little before I ate," she replied, pissed.
I didn't answer but concentrated on eating for a while. Until I finally cleared my throat, stood up, and got drinks.
When I sat again, I looked directly at her. "What do you want to talk about?" I asked, as a small peace offering.
If Emilio really insisted on throwing the party, I better find out things about my wife that would make it easier to step into the shoes of her husband.
Maybe I should have told her about it. However, I liked it much better not to inform her until Emilio disclosed that the party was taking place.
"I don't know. I was hoping you would go first, Vincenzo." She put particular emphasis on my name.
Instinctively, I knew she was expecting something from me. Cooperation? I had assumed that our agreement was unmistakably clear.
"You know about the big cats, and the house. That's all there is to tell."
"There's nothing you can tell me about yourself?" She stared at me as if I had just punched her.
Good. There was a lot to tell, but that didn't mean her ears were the right ones for it. What did she want to hear? How, one day, my life had done a one hundred and eighty?
"I want you to tell me anything about yourself, not about having a dead wife," she added a little more gently as if she had guessed precisely where my thoughts were drifting.
From her words it sounded like I was defining myself over Rina. I pressed my lips together and dug deep into my thoughts to find something relatively harmless to tell her so she would be satisfied.
"My siblings and I knew from the beginning who we were and what to expect in adulthood," I finally said.
"That's not unusual, is it?"
"I don't know how other families handle it. Looking back, I find it disturbing at what age the sight of blood and death was normal for me."
"What about Carlotta? Only the immediate family knows she exists, don't they?"
"Right." However, did she come up with that?
"Why? So why would you choose to keep the existence of a child a secret."
"Because there was another child before Carlotta," I replied.
Amedea gave me a strange look.
"The others were too young to remember. Therefore it was better to remain a secret," I explained.
"What happened to this child?"
I twisted my mouth. My memory of it was still very vivid, though that didn't necessarily make it a beautiful one. "It was an infant girl. My parents had hired a nanny, but the woman soon turned out to be untrustworthy. Namely, the moment she kidnapped the child and gave her to my father's archenemy."
