She resisted, and continued, ‘Was that when the doctors diagnosed her with depression?’
‘Yes,’ he hissed heavily. ‘And medicated her.’
She nodded. ‘She wasn’t well, Raffaele. She was sick and she was relying on a little boy to carry her pain for her. She focused all her energy on the wrong place. The wrong person. Because her attention should have been on you. She pretended she’d had a great romance with an Italian noble—but her romance was a tragedy. It wasn’t love. Her happily-ever-after was never coming—but ours can. If we trust in what we’re feeling.’
That pulse pounded in his cheek. He was coming back to her from wherever he’d gone. Into the past? But would he hear her? Understand?
She pushed on. ‘That storm took you both to hospital—it saved her and broke you when it should have given you every urge to live life without restraint. It should have told you she wasn’t accountable for her lack of love. Her lack of care for you when she couldn’t care for herself. Love doesn’t hurt. I won’t hurt you,’ she promised. ‘So let me love you. And admit,’ she said, ‘that you love me too.’
‘I don’t,’ he said roughly. ‘I don’t love you.’
‘Wanting to take care of someoneislove, Raffaele,’ she insisted. ‘Keeping them safe. Feeding them breakfast in the afternoon because they skipped it that morning. It’s looking for someone in a storm because you need to know they’re safe. It’s Matteo,’ she said, as the memory of the man’s name jolted a memory of what he’d told her about the storm.
Matteo had rescued him.
‘Matteo the bar-owner,’ she continued, ‘showed up at your wedding, with all the villagers at his back, to see the boy he rescued from a storm living his life. Theyallcame to see you get married.’
‘It was just respect for what I did for them—’
‘No,’ she rejected, her voice a harsh rasp. ‘It was foryou. Love is lots of things, but most of all it’s actions.’
She steeled herself for the next part. For the bit that would hurt him the most. She was going to rip off the plaster and make him hear it.
‘Love is a little boy brushing his mother’s hair when all she wants to do is sleep.’
‘How could I have loved her, Flora?’ he whispered. ‘As soon as I could, I left her. I only came back when I learned of my father’s death. I didn’t want her to be alone when she found out.’
‘Because of what might happen?’ she asked quietly.
‘It happened anyway,’ he said. ‘I came back. I told her. And she died. Because as soon as I’d told her I left again and paid other people to look after her. To hear her cries. Her screaming that this was not how it was supposed to be. He promised he’d return, but now he was dead. I left her alone in her grief and she ended her life. If love was all the things—theactions—you say it is, I would have stayed and watched her with my own eyes. Not paid for doctors to care for a woman they couldn’t protect.’
‘It was never your job to protect her from herself,’ she told him. ‘Your mother made her own choices. Choices you’ll never understand. Just like I will never understand why my mother gave me up for adoption.’
‘They are not the same thing,’ he snarled, teeth bared.
‘You’re right. They’re not. Because I grew up with a family that loved me. I understand all the choices they made now. Because loveiswanting to protect your own. Your family. Did they always get it right? No. But I understand it now. I understand it was love that pushed them to decide what they did.’
‘I failed my mother because ofmydecisions and now she is dead,’ he said. ‘Because of me. Because I looked away.Thatis not love.’
He closed his eyes. Shut her out. And she let him.
He laid his head back against the headrest. ‘What is your compulsion to have life-changing conversations in moving transport?’
‘Instinct,’ she replied. ‘Because every time we’ve been in the helicopter, a car, I know that when we get out things will happen. And I want to decide with you—together—what happens next.’
He didn’t open his eyes, but the fingers splayed on his spread thigh flexed.
‘We could be in bed. We could be anywhere but here,’ he said, his voice gruff, coming from somewhere deep in his chest.
‘Still hiding from the elephant in the room?’
His eyes flew open. ‘I am not hiding. I am answering your questions—your statements of love—truthfully, however much you might dislike my replies.’
‘And then what will you be doing?’
‘Everything I said I would,’ he clipped.
She slapped straight back. ‘In the storm on the boat you said you should never have put your reaction to the past on me. But you still are, Raffaele. I’m not your mother, and you’re not your father. I don’t know how to make you understand that this is love—’
