We sat down on the white bench near the small duck pond and began chatting. I tugged my red scarf a little closer and we chatted. Max was my father’s right-hand man and had been closer to me than him. He’d also been my handler in the Thieve's Guild.
“I called you here today because I feel you need to know about this,” he took a breath.
Frowning, I watched as he pulled some papers out of his pocket. They looked well worn and had turned slightly brown with age.
“What is this?”
“For many years,” Max said softly. “I watched as your father ruined every good thing in his life. Your mother…”
My breath hitched in my throat. Everything seemed so bright and loud all of a sudden. Max hardly ever mention my mother and often I wondered if it was because he’d held some sort of hidden affection for her.
He couldn’t finish his sentence and handed over the papers to me.
“I couldn’t always save the women in his life, but this woman. I helped her to get away from his clutches.”
Max looked off into the distance, his eyes following the nearest ducks. They had started to quack up a storm. I realized that daffodils were starting to peak up around us. Signs of an early spring awakening were appearing.
Looking back to the papers in my hands, I realized that I was holding two birth certificates. These were two brand new lifelines.
“The mother?” I asked.
“She’s deceased.”
The paper felt like weights in my hands. A sinking feeling noted in my stomach.
“Damn.”
Max turned to me. “You’ve always been like the daughter I never had, Mona Lisa. I should have fought harder for you to go off and pursue your dreams. The guild should have never been part of your dreams.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
Max’s brown eyes, wisened with time closed briefly. When he opened them, I saw a life time of pain that couldn’t be erased.
“I couldn’t leave you alone in the world.”
“What?”
He patted my knee. “They’ve found stage three cancer. Pancreas.”
“Oh my God, Max.”
“Hey,” he looked at me. “I’m not dead, yet. And I’m going fight, but there was no way I could let you go on thinking that piece of shit brother was the only sibling you had left in the world. Their other sister…Nova.”
My eyes went wide. “Nova..as in Nova Safaryan. Ex thief turned mafia queen?”
He nodded. “Yeah, that one shocked me too. She was a decent thief. Her attachments to the children were what held her back.”
“Holy fuck! I have another brother and a sister.”
Disbelief was flooding me. It was grounding me. My mother had always wanted other children, but once she’d stopped letting my father pimp her out, she had decided that one child would make due.
“They have been well taken care of,” Max assured me.
“He can never know about them,” I turned to eye Max. “Never.”
“For all the evil that man created, the best thing that he ever did was to have you for a daughter.”
Max stood then and gave a slight stretch. He was getting older and it made me realize that while some of the men in my life had been complete and utter assholes, Max hadn’t. Flashes of my seventh birthday flashed in my head.
