“Yes, she’s your half sister. She has your father’s eyes. As do you.”
“Does she know?”
“That you’re related? Yes. She’s always known.”
Gio took one of the photos of her off the wall and held it out in question. “And you never told anyone?” So many emotions were rushing through him he wasn’t sure how he felt.
Leora asked, “Are you hungry? Thirsty?”
“No,” Gio said and a sick feeling came over him. “She wasn’t a secret, was she?”
Leora smoothed her hands down her plain dress. “Your mother had every right to hate me and any child we made. I understood that. Your father loved Patrice, so I did also. I kept my silence out of respect for her.”
Gio laid the photo down on the mantel. “Living with another woman’s husband doesn’t fit any definition of love or respect I’m aware of.”
Leora picked up the photo he’d put down and placed it back where it belonged. “Your mother has always been a complicated woman. She didn’t love your father. She tried to, but she couldn’t fool herself or him.”
Gio turned his back to Leora and looked out the window, seeing but not seeing the boats passing on the Grand Canal below. “Isn’t that what all married men tell the women they screw on the side? That their wives don’t love them?”
“Maybe,” she said softly. “But in this case, it was true. I have nothing to prove to you, Gio. No reason to lie to you. Your mother is a very unhappy woman. She has been for a long time. Happiness is a choice, you know. Like love. You either open yourself up to it or you don’t. Your mother could never let the past go long enough to see what all that anger was costing her. She let a man who loved her slip away to Venice. A man who would have gone back to her if she’d ever let him into her heart.” The words were too similar to those Julia had used for him not to be shaken by them.
He turned back to face her, unable to conceal the bitterness in his voice. “My father made a second family here because he loved my mother so much? Pardon me if I find your take on the scenario tainted by your desire to make it palatable.”
Leora looked at him sadly. “Believe what you want, but Gio loved your mother, and he loved you and your brothers.”
“Why do you call him Gio? He went by George.”
With memories luring her away for a moment, Leora said, “Not when he was here in Italy. In the States, he was who he thought your mother needed him to be. He may have even been happy in that American lifestyle for a while. But in his heart he was always Gio.” She smiled at him warmly. “Here he laughed louder, worried less about what others thought of him, and enjoyed the simple pleasures—like being a father.”
“Father to a bastard child.”
Leora shrugged. “Call Gigi what you want, but it won’t change what we had. Your father loved us. Just as he loved you.”
When Gio said nothing, Leora walked over to a shelf and took down a leather-bound book. “Do you think your father loved you less because he had us?” She handed him the large book. “He kept a scrapbook of you and your brothers. He would sit with Gigi and tell her stories about all of you. He promised one day he would introduce her to you and she would have a large family, as he’d always had.”
Gio reluctantly took the book and opened it angrily. His father had filled page after page with the story of his sons’ childhoods. There were clippings from articles they had been mentioned in, along with notes describing why the event had been important. He closed the book abruptly. “Why didn’t he?”
“Only your father could truly answer that question. Or perhaps your mother.” She studied his face and asked, “Tell me, Gio, why do you choose to use the Italian version of your name? Who are you in your heart?”
“I’m not my father,” Gio said defensively. He thought back to the summer he’d chosen to no longer go by George. It had been during one of his visits to Isola Santos. His cousins had called him by the name and it had felt right. So right that nearly no one called him George anymore. God, how could I have forgotten? All this time I told myself that I hated them, even as I hung on to the one thing they gave me.
My name.
“We are all our parents in one way or another, Gio. The best and the worst of them. Find the good in your father, Gio, and forgive him for what he’s not here to explain to you. And don’t judge your mother too harshly. We don’t know what closed her heart.”
Gio was coming to the uncomfortable realization that after ten years of fearing that he would end up like his father—he’d become something worse.
He was as bitter and closed off as his mother.
And it had cost him just as it had cost her.
It may very well have robbed him of the only woman he could imagine spending the rest of his life with. Julia.
He looked Leora in the eye and asked, “Would you mind if I contact Gigi?”
“I would love that.”
Gio walked around the room again, studying the photos of his family and hers. “My brothers don’t know about you. I thought it was better for them if they didn’t. I was wrong. I’ll tell them about you now. About both of you.”
“You are always welcome here, Gio. Your brothers, too.”
Hitting an overload of emotions, Gio made his excuses and left—promising to return. He walked back to the bridge where Julia had left him and stood there for a long time, replaying the day in his head.
*
An hour later, Gio stepped out of a hired car onto a private airfield. The pilot met him and asked where he wanted to go, but Gio didn’t answer.
“Wherever Julia went,” didn’t feel like a sane answer. Was she still in Italy, or on her way back to New York?
A limo pulled up beside them and all four of the doors opened simultaneously.
“Looks like we got here just in time,” Luke said.
Gio shook his head in surprise. “What are all of you doing here?”
A tall blond man stepped out of the car and said, “We came to find you.”
Gio’s eyebrows rose at the sight of the would-be groom. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
Stephan smiled sadly. “We postponed the wedding until tomorrow. Nicole understands why we had to.”
Gio looked from cousin to brothers and back. “I don’t.”
Stephan took an envelope out of his pocket and bounced it in his hand as if he were weighing it before offering it. “I found myself in a tricky spot this past summer. A close brush with my own mortality changed the way I look at many things.”
Gio took the envelope. He opened it and read the contents. His name was clearly printed on the top of the deed for Isola Santos.
“I can’t take this,” he said, his voice thick with emotion.
“I don’t want it. It should have gone to you. Just be careful, Gio. I spent years chasing it. I thought it was important. It’s just a rock in the ocean. It doesn’t matter. Nicole is what’s important to me now. And my family.”
A rush of emotion filled Gio. Stephan wasn’t pretending to care about him.