“Belvedere is a small town,” I snap. “All that matters is I know now. You lied to me. I wonder why.”
Elisa keeps her eyes riveted on the toes of her boots. “You didn’t seem like the type of person I should be sharing my private life with. And even less so now.”
“Were you afraid of being judged?”
“That too.”
“Christ, Elisa! I don’t live in the Middle Ages. Do you really think I would have been shocked by the fact that you had a daughter at seventeen?”
“I was sixteen when I got pregnant.”
“Ah, sixteen! Well, that changes everything,” I comment sarcastically.
She shrugs, becoming defenseless in a way I’ve never seen before, dropping the armor she’s worn since the day I arrived. “Being a single mother in a village of three thousand, two hundred inhabitants wasn’t exactly easy. Everyone stared at me, whispered, called me a bad person behind their Cheshire cat smiles. At least many of the mothers werehappy to note that there would be one less rival for their daughters’ future husbands.”
“Why?”
Elisa turns to look at me with a quirked eyebrow. “First of all, I was no angel, and second, I already have a daughter. I’m demanding, very absent, and unappealing. But I don’t care. There’s no one in town whose wife I aspire to become. I don’t aspire to become a wife in general,” she explains.
“But why were you and Linda left alone?”
She lets out a nervous laugh. “Is that an indirect way of asking who the father is?”
“If you want to tell me. Do I know him?” I ask. Maybe he’s one of the guys from our gang of terrors. “Is it Lapo? Or Cosimo?”
“No way! Lapo married Margherita.” Both were part of our daredevil group.
“The girl with the red hair?”
“Yes, her. He’s the village accountant; she works at the post office.”
“And Cosimo?”
“We can’t even mention Cosimo’s name in public. He betrayed all the mothers.”
“How?”
“He came out four years ago: He’s with a man from Fiesole, and they opened an artisanal perfume shop in Florence, in San Frediano.”
“That’s why as a child Cosimo always wanted to pretend to be a seamstress, a hairdresser, a concierge ...”
“The mothers really had their hopes up over him. It was a real drama.”
“We were talking about you,” I remind her.
“Anyway, you don’t know the father. He was an Australian exchange student we hosted at the estate for a few weeks. He was on a trip to research Chianti production.”
“A long-distance love?” I hypothesize. Although the question is completely harmless, I’m surprised to have a strange fear of the answer.
“Just a summer crush. He was hasty and selfish; I was gullible and superficial. The night before he left, having sex seemed like the natural conclusion to our flirtation. Then, about three weeks later, I realized our connection wasn’t over at all.”
“Did you tell him? Are you still in touch?” The questions come pouring out of me.
“I wrote dozens of emails but never sent them. What could he have done from the other side of the world? And we barely knew each other,” she sighs, shrugging her shoulders.
“So you decided to do what you always do, fend for yourself,” I conclude.
“Yeah.”
