Cruel Legacy

Matteo rubbed his eyes as if the motion could rub the memories away.

He shouldn’t be thinking of all this now.

Why had he even come here, to the house she had shared with Pieta?

A light came on upstairs.

Had she just woken? Or had she been in the darkness all this time?

And was Francesca right to be worried about her?

Francesca had cornered him as he’d been making his own escape from the wake and asked him to keep an eye on Natasha while she, Francesca, was in Caballeros. She was worried about her, said she’d become a lost, mute ghost.

Although Natasha and Pieta had only been married for a year, they’d been together for seven years. She might be a gold-digging, heartless bitch but surely in that time she must have developed some feelings for him.

He’d wanted her feelings for Pieta to be genuine, for his cousin’s sake. But how could they have been when she’d been seeing them both behind each other’s backs?

Other than the few social family occasions he’d been unable to get out of, he’d cut her out of his life completely. He’d blocked her number, deleted every email and text message they’d exchanged and burned all her old-fashioned handwritten letters. The times he’d felt obliged to be in her presence he’d perfected the art of subtly blanking her in a way that didn’t draw attention to anyone but her.

He should have just said no to Francesca. Lied and said he was returning home to Miami earlier than planned.

Instead he’d nodded curtly and promised to drop round if he had five minutes over the next couple of days.

So why had he driven here when he’d left the castello fully intending to drive straight to the hotel?

* * *

Natasha pushed Pieta’s study door open and swallowed hard before stepping into it. After a moment she switched the light on. After going from room to room in complete darkness, in the house that had been her home for a year, her eyes took a few moments to adjust to the brightness.

She didn’t know what she was looking for or what she was doing. She didn’t know anything. She was lost. Alone.

She’d stayed at the wake as long as had been decently possible but all the consolation from the other mourners had become too much. Seeing Matteo everywhere she’d looked had been just as hard. Harder. Her mother pulling her to one side to ask

if there was a chance she could be pregnant had been the final straw.

She’d had to get out before she’d screamed the castello down and her tongue ran away with itself before she could pull it back.

The rest of the Pellegrinis were staying at the castello and with sympathetic but concerned eyes had accepted her explanation that she wanted to be on her own.

At her insistence, the household staff had all stayed at the wake.

This was the first time she’d been alone in the house since she’d received the terrible news.

Feeling like an intruder in the room that had been her husband’s domain, she cast her gaze over the walls thick with the books he’d read. A stack of files he’d brought home to work on, either from his law firm or the foundation he’d been so proud of, lay on his desk. Next to it sat the thick leather-bound tome on Stanley and Livingstone she’d bought him for his recent birthday. A bookmark poked out a third of the way through it.

Her throat closing tightly, she picked the book up and hugged it to her chest then with a wail that seemed to come from nowhere sank to the floor and sobbed for the man who had lied to her and everyone else for years, but who had done so much good in the world.

Pieta would never finish this book. He would never see the hospital his siblings would build in his memory. He would never take delivery of the new car he’d ordered only the day before he’d died.

He would never have the chance to tell his family the truth about who he’d really been.

‘Oh, Pieta,’ she whispered between the tears. ‘Wherever you are, I hope you’re finally at peace with yourself.’

The sound of the doorbell rang out.

She rolled into a ball and covered her ears.

The caller was insistent, pressing the doorbell intermittently until she could ignore it no longer. Wiping the tears away, she dragged herself up from the study floor and went down the stairs, clinging to the bannister for support, mentally preparing what she would say to get rid of her unexpected visitor.