“Your dad was just filling me in on my Mom’s reputation,” I say. “When she first came to Boston.”
Behind his glasses, Aidan’s eyes go wide, but he says nothing.
Mr. O’Leary drops the sponge and puts out a hand for Aidan’s dish towel to dry his hands. “It’s not my place. I’m sorry, Finch, if I’ve overstepped—”
“No, you haven’t. I’d just like to know exactly what you mean. Please,” I add, as he still seems reticent. “I don’t know all that much about my Mom’s early life. It’d actually be real nice to hear something about it.”
Mr. O’Leary still seems troubled. “Well…I only know the bare bones of the story, but the gossip was, her parents wanted her out of New York after she…” He clears his throat. “They thought she’d made an unsuitable match. They wanted her here to get her away from a particular man. Older than her, and, well.” He coughs. “Italian.”
“Tino Morelli,” I supply.
He hesitates, but nods. “That was the rumor. But when she arrived here, she got swept up with some even nastier crowds.”
“The Donovans?”
“Not the Donovans.” Mr. O’Leary looks like he wishes he’d never started this line of conversation, but I’m desperate to know.
“Please,” I murmur. “Just tell me.”
The information comes out of him in a quiet rush, while he’s glancing towards the dining room. The crowd in there is still talking and laughing, but Aidan and I hang on every soft word his father speaks. “The story was, she was working with the Irish Freedom Fighters. She married Howard Donovan on their say-so, a strategic match to strengthen ties between the IFF and the Donovan Family, and word on the street was, they thought Orla would keep your dad Howard in line. He was crazy for her. Worshipped the ground she walked on.”
“At first, maybe,” I say bitterly. “But then later, she rekindled her relationship with…” With Tino Morelli. And made me. “So you’re saying my mother…was a terrorist.”
I know in my heart that what Aidan’s father has said is all true. It makes too much sense in too many ways. My memories of Mom have been colored my whole life by what happened in the last moments of hers—and only recently have I started to come back to the better memories, the less blood-soaked ones. But the truth is, even the worst of my memories are still biased towards my mother. Pops was never a good father, even before he found out I was really the son of another man. Naturally I preferred my mother, who always showered me with love and affection.
Others in the family hadn’t felt the same. Maggie, for one. Maybe her resentment and hatred for our mother wasn’tjustbuilt on her affair with Tino Morelli. Maybe there were childhood wounds there that were only exacerbated as time went on.
My mother was a charming woman, and she was manipulative.
My mother was dedicated to her family, and she had an affair with one of the Donovans’ greatest enemies.
My mother insisted that we give to the poor, that we show charity, think about the less fortunate…but she never showed the kind of genuine empathy I see in Aidan. No, for my mother it was a sense ofnoblesse oblige. The notion that we werebetterthan other people, and therefore had a duty to bring sparks of joy into their otherwise dull lives.
Frankly, my mother had a few twisted ideas. And it doesn’t shock me when I consider that some of those twisted ideas might have been in line with the philosophy of the IFF.
“I didn’t know your mother personally,” Mr. O’Leary says gently. “Everything I heard was secondhand from my brother, and from a long time ago. But…well. In time, she was able to pull away from the more radical ideals of her youth. She and your father both; they worked to move the Donovan Family away from the IFF.”
It’s not much to say about either of them—that they preferred organized crime to terrorism—but I guess it’s something.
* * *
I’mquiet on the way back to Hillview House, quiet enough that Luca takes my hand and squeezes it to get my attention. “What’s wrong, angel?”
I can’t talk about it right now. Not sitting in the backseat of a car with someone I love. It reminds me too much of those last moments with Mom, and I’m too jumbled up to think straight. “Later,” I mutter.
Later turns out to be sooner than I thought—as soon as Luca gets me alone in the bedroom, in fact. “Did something happen? Did someone say something to you?” he demands, pulling me into his arms.
“No. Well, yes, kinda.” His face darkens and I can’t help smiling a little. “Calm down, honey. You don’t need to send out Gio and his gun, it wasn’t anything…” I sigh, my smile dropping. “Aidan’s father just told me some stuff about my Mom that I didn’t know. Or maybe I did know, and I just didn’t want to put the clues together.”
“I think you’ll need to explain more clearly,” Luca says, and glances over his shoulder. “In bed?”
“In bed.”
Not everything can be solved with sex, but it sure makes problems seem lighter. But once we’re snuggled under the covers and I fully expect a sexy hand job—orsomething—Luca just turns gingerly onto his side, and pulls the sheet up over our heads, making a white cocoon for us.
“Okay,” he says, tracing my cheek with one finger. “Spill.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
