Eva said, ‘Well, I just wanted to see that you’ve settled in all right—and apologise for my absence yesterday. You must have thought me terribly rude.’
Annah shook her head. ‘Not at all. I’m sorry you weren’t well.’
‘It was just a migraine. They come and go.’
Stepping back, Annah opened the door wider and smiled. ‘Would you like to meet your grandson?’
Eva’s eyes suddenly glistened. She nodded. ‘I would like that very much.’
Annah called to Ethan. When he emerged from the bedroom, Eva placed a trembling hand over her mouth and Annah could see she was fighting back tears. A lump rose in Annah’s throat. Eva Cavallari was not the cool, aloof woman she’d expected. Meeting her grandson clearly meant a great deal to her. For the first time since their arrival, Annah felt glad that she and Ethan were here.
After the introductions, Eva invited them to join her for afternoon tea in the garden and arranged for two staff members to carry down a large wooden chest. She helped Ethan lift the lid and his eyes goggled. The chest was filled with old, beautifully preserved toys.
‘These belonged to my boys,’ Eva explained to Annah, a hint of melancholy in her smile. ‘I could never bring myself to give them away.’
Ethan, thinking Christmas had arrived early, played happily on the lawn while his mother and grandmother sat in the shade of a gazebo.
Out of the blue, Eva said quietly, ‘You must wonder what kind of woman I am to have stayed married to a man like Luca’s father.’
Annah looked at her and tried to contain her surprise. ‘It’s really none of my business,’ she said, even though the question had entered her thoughts.
Eva’s lips quivered. She pressed them tightly together. After a moment, she said, ‘I’m so sorry, Annah. For what Franco did. If I had known...’
Hearing the anguish in the older woman’s voice, Annah reached across the table and laid her hand on Eva’s. ‘What’s done is done,’ she said gently, speaking the same words she’d repeated to herself many times in recent days. ‘The best we can do now is focus on the future.’
Eva put her other hand over Annah’s and offered a grateful smile. ‘I wish my son were as forgiving as you, my dear.’
Annah frowned. ‘He doesn’t blame you for his father’s actions, surely?’
Eva sat back, her gaze settling on Ethan as he ran across the lawn holding aloft a wooden toy aeroplane. ‘Not for this, perhaps. But Luca has been angry with me for many years. He thinks I should have left his father and taken him and Enzo with me when they were young.’ She paused, shook her head. ‘Franco was not the kind of man you walk away from. He would never have let me take the boys, and I would never have left them.’ She smiled sadly. ‘I thought if I stayed I could protect them. In the end, in different ways, I lost them both.’
Annah’s heart twisted with sympathy. ‘I’m so sorry about Enzo.’
Eva looked at her in surprise. ‘Luca told you?’
‘Not the details. Just that his brother died three years ago.’
Eva nodded. Her gaze sought out Ethan again, as if the sight of him brought her comfort. ‘Ethan looks so much like Luca and Enzo did when they were little.’
As if sensing the women’s attention, Ethan turned and bounded across the grass towards them. Annah’s heart swelled with love. She couldn’t begin to imagine the kind of pain Eva had suffered, losing her youngest son.
Ethan leant against the side of his grandmother’s chair. ‘What should I call you?’
Eva bent her head down. ‘Can you say nonna?’
‘Nonna,’ he repeated, and he and his grandmother beamed at each other.
Annah’s heart gave another fierce squeeze. She thought of her own mother, who’d visited her grandson once when he was tiny and shown little interest in him. Yet here was Eva, patently thrilled to acknowledge her grandson.
Luca was right. Ethan was half-Sicilian. Half-Cavallari. Luca and Eva were his family and they wanted to be a part of his life. How could Annah deny him their love? She couldn’t. No more than she could ever withhold her own love from him.
Which meant she didn’t have a choice. She and Luca had to find a way to make this co-parenting thing work.
Luca prowled down the marble hallway towards the dining room, his dark, edgy mood not improved by the knowledge that his thirty-six-hour absence would not have done him any favours with Annah.
He glanced at his watch and grimaced. After not returning at all the previous night, he had called Victor and asked him to inform Annah and his mother to expect him by seven-thirty this evening at the latest.
It was now nine o’clock.