“Tell me about yourself,” he murmured sleepily. The painkillers were starting to take effect, and he wanted to hear somebody else’s voice.
“What do you mean?”
“Tell me about your life. Who really is Antía Freire?”
“To be honest, there’s not much to tell.” She sounded faintly embarrassed. “I’m afraid my life will seem really boring compared to yours.”
“Try me.”
“Let’s see.” She sighed and unconsciously gathered her hair back in a graceful movement. “I was born in a hospital on the mainland, but I’ve lived on the island almost my whole life, except when I was at college.”
“Really? And what did you study?”
“Marketing and business management,” she replied, with a hint of pride.
“Really?” Roberto’s eyes grew wide. “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”
“Why not?” Antía replied brusquely but with a half smile. “Thought I was some island hick who barely knew how to read?”
“That’s not what I meant. I’m just surprised, that’s all.”
“I’m the first Freire to go to college. My family made a big effort to pay for it; I’ve always hoped to pay them back one day.”
“How?”
Antía sighed again. “I wanted to set up a hotel on the island, maybe with a small fleet of boats that would serve as a ferry service, to bring guests from the mainland. More or less what I do now with the rental properties but in a place I could call my own, something I’d built up from scratch.”
“Sounds like a great idea. Why didn’t you do it?”
There was a brief pause.
“I was very young, and a bit of an idiot, and I was in love with a guy who turned out not to be who I’d thought he was. I married him.”
“Oh dear.” Roberto propped himself up on his good arm. “Are you still together?”
Another pause, this time shorter. Antía shrugged. “Not anymore. He was a sailor. Still is.”
“That’s a hard life.”
“You don’t know the half of it. Do you know what they call the wives of sailors—sailors who spend months at sea?”
“Not a clue.”
“Grass widows.” She pronounced the words as if they had a bitter taste. “Women who only see their partners for three or four months a year, if that. Lonely women, who often have to run the household and bring up the kids on their own, with an absent husband.”
“Doesn’t sound like a great arrangement.”
“It wasn’t,” she replied. “And when he realized that Diego and I weren’t going to accept that kind of life, he wasn’t very happy ... and I wasn’t very happy with his reaction.”
“Diego? What’s this got to do with your brother?” asked Roberto, surprised.
By way of response, she sighed and stared straight back at him. Roberto suddenly understood.
“Diego isn’t your brother!”
“No, he isn’t,” she replied, with the saddest smile he could imagine on a woman’s face. “Diego’s my son.”
Immediately, everything made sense. Antía’s protective attitude toward the boy. Her fierce, almost desperate reaction when she thought he’d killed Pampín. Their extraordinary physical resemblance.
