She imagined him as a little boy. Whilst no photographs existed online of him from that time, she had no doubt he would have been a beautiful child. What would it have been like for him to have had a happy life, then have it ripped away from him, without warning? For his father to simply give him up. Then she considered the mathematics of it all.
‘You’re thirty-five.’
‘Mmm.’
‘A-and…’ she wouldn’t mention the name, ‘…he’snot that much younger.’
‘The affair had been going on for some time. My father led two lives. Apparently, it took time for his lover to reach an age where money held in trust for her became unencumbered. When it did, he left.’
‘I don’t know what to say. He just…abandoned you.’
‘I accepted that my father didn’t want us.’ Leo laughed darkly, a bitter sound. ‘But it’s worse than you could imagine. I was just seventeen and I left my mother to seek my fortune in Rome. What a fool. I was young and angry but I saw and learned a lot in my two years on the streets. Everyone there had a story. Broken families, alcohol, drugs, infidelity. It was my life and that of so many other wandering souls. Then, when I was nineteen, my mother died and I had to go back to Milan and clean out her flat. And I found…’
He turned his face away from her and she knew that this hurt him. That this was where his pain lay. Something deep and ingrained like an abscess poisoning him from the inside out.
She simply sat with him, stroking his chest, saying nothing and waiting.
‘…I found furniture designs, sketches. All in my mother’s hand. My father wasn’t the genius behind what they made. He might have been the craftsman, but the designs themselves…’ Leo turned to look at her, his gaze bleak, ‘He stole them from my mother.’
The acid burned in Leo’s gut. His mother had never said anything to him about his father taking her designs as his own. However, the evidence was clear. He knew his mother’s writing, how she drew when she’d do little sketches for him occasionally. It was her work. He was sure of it. All the pictures of furniture, the designs his father had taken and turned into his own, had been stolen.
‘Did she ever try to get them back?’
Leo shook his head. ‘He left her with nothing but a child to feed.’
All he could remember was her trying to keep a roof over their heads and something on the table, meagre though it was. She’d worked herself to the bone doing so. There was no time for anything else.
‘With the drawings, could you prove this?’ Simone asked.
At the time he was simply a young man, angry and grieving and a solicitor had said he couldn’t help, not without more proof. By then, the designs had already been trademarked and registered by his father. Later, even with all his resources, there was still nothing he could do. He’d been advised that the sketches would prove nothing in a court of law.
‘Not with my mother dead. Perhaps if she’d been alive, with her word against my father’s and the drawings, then maybe. But with her gone and all the money behind him, there is no proof conclusive enough. ThoughIknow. He became famous by building his wealth from lies and theft.’
‘And that’s why you hate him,’ Simone said. ‘For leaving your mother. Stealing from her and leaving you.’
Leo closed his eyes not wanting to see the look of pity on Simone’s face. This was the part of his story he’d divulged to no one.
‘Your mom must have still been young when she passed away.’
‘She was in her forties.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Simone said, leaning over and kissing the centre of his chest, right where his aching heart lay.
‘She gave up all her dreams to keep me fed, to look after me as a child and then I left, searching for my own dreams. I should have been there for her. I should have sent more money home, so she didn’t have to work so hard. Then one night when coming back to her apartment from a cleaning job in winter she slipped on ice on some stairs and she died.’
He shut his eyes, fighting the burn of tears he refused to shed. He wasn’t worthy of the grief. When he’d seen Simone lying broken at the bottom of those stairs, it was like his life had flashed before his eyes. History repeating itself because he’d been thinking about himself and what he’d wanted, instead of her.
‘Oh, Leo,’ Simone said. ‘You’ve carried so much grief on your own.’
‘Yet here I am.’
‘Here you are.’
Still, he’d carried on. For so long he’d been so angry about everything. In his teens, before he’d left for Rome, it had been because he’d wanted more than the threadbare life they’d led, the constant struggle. Then trying to assuage that anger on the streets and ending up getting involved in organised crime, which was another secret he’d managed to keep hidden from the world. He’d been trying for years to help the families he’d once hurt, although it never felt like it was enough. He had to atone for his mistakes.
Simone cupped his cheek, her expression soft and full of care. ‘Are you going to do anything more with what you know?’
He didn’t want to talk any more. Right now, it was as if Simone had cracked open his chest and asked him to show her his heart. Although he had to admit something about the weight of all he’d been carrying, had lifted a fraction.
