She brightened at that. “That’s what I’ve been learning.”
The statement felt like a launch board to ask what happened. Between her and her father. With her ban from tennis.
I always kept an eye on her career, even if it stung like salt water on a papercut. And a two-year ban for a cheating scandal she had confessed to? That made headlines.
“So where have you been this summer?” I asked, and she launched into it like I was a friend, not the mother she hadn’t seen in decades – countries, parties, cobbled streets. It was everything to me, to hear her adventures in every country that borders the Mediterranean.
We swapped tales of running down cobbled streets, nights run into the wee hours. She was exactly how I was at that age; wild, adventurous; but something about her told me that she had seen too much, been hurt too much. She’d tell me about her life, but nothing more than surface level anecdotes. Nothing about how she was doing.
Until she asked, “Why did you stop calling?”
The question struck me hard, aimed straight at my heart. My hands tightened as I replayed every single phone call I ever made to her. First, the ones when she was young, her cute baby voice so sweet and innocent. Then those when she got a little older, began to know and understand who the strange woman on the other side of the phone should be to her. And then every phone call where he made up some excuse why she couldn’t come to the phone. The dead dial tones when he changed his number and I had to go through my solicitor to get the new one.
The legal letters I’d get in return. The warnings and threats.
“What do you mean?”
“When I was a kid. You used to call. Sundays or the weekend. Birthdays and Christmases.” One particular Christmas morningseared into my memory had no issue reliving itself. “Why did it stop?”
I leaned forward, taking a necessary sip of the tea we’d ordered, trying to summon any and all courage I had left.
My voice was still a rasp when I answered, “I never stopped. Not until your dad cut me off.”
“Matteo.” She said his name like a command, a correction.
My eyebrows furrowed together. “Not Dad?”
“Dads don’t do what he did,” she said. How much did she know? “He doesn’t deserve the title. I’m learning that more every day apparently.”
“I thought…” I started. Every excuse I had for what had happened between us felt wrong. Felt not enough for being selfish, for believing his lies. “I thought he was best for you. I was a mess when I had you. And he promised he’d look after you. He was older. I wasn’t ready.”
She held my gaze, and I waited for her to push up and storm out, to not believe my side of the story. She didn’t move an inch.
“The ban,” Scottie said, her gaze shifting, checking if she’d be overheard. “It wasn’t…I didn’t do that.”
I paused, trying to put the pieces together. “It wasn’t…” I couldn’t manage the words, the thought itself despicable. Matteo had always been driven by two things: victory and legacy. He already had one, and I’d given him the other.
Did he set her up?
Scottie didn’t answer. And I didn’t push any further, judging from the uncertainty in her eyes, her tensed shoulders, that this was a wound too fresh for brunch. Instead, she took a sip from her cup and asked, as if it was the easiest thing in the world, “I want to change my surname, and I wanted to ask if you wouldn’t mind lending me yours.”
“Mine?” I could barely believe it. Rossi was a big name in tennis, and she’d become a brand in her own right. To changeher name, to erase his legacy, it all confirmed what I thought I knew. “You want to be a Sinclair?”
“I need a fresh start,” she said. “Maybe we both do, and Sinclair feels as good as any.”
“It’s your name, Scottie,” I said. “You never needed to ask permission.”
“Old habits and all that.” She shrugged it off.
Her words left me puzzled. Again, I didn’t dare push. I had to earn that right first.
“You know, if you ever fancy staying in London for a bit, I’ve got a town house,” I offered cautiously.
She thought to herself for a moment, looking out the window, taking in the beautiful Parisian skyline around us. “I was thinking about visiting in the fall. It’d be nice to have a home for a little while.”
And, as she said it, I realized she wasn’t only asking for a new name. She was asking for a new life, one I might finally be part of. For the first time in years, the past loosened its grip, and the future didn’t feel like a stranger but something waiting, just within reach.
In the middle of that restaurant in Paris, I saw my daughter at last: beautiful, haunted, scarred, and unbroken.
