“Tell me. You can trust me.”
Trust? She had only herself for so long that to trust in others, especially on such a subject, was almost impossible.
“You know I want a family. I no longer wish to be a pitied orphan. Now, what is it you have for me?”
He frowned at her change of subject, but he had to get back to the subject at hand. “These. I thought you might like them.”
Lucinda looked up, and as he placed an item in her hands. Did she dare look down? But of course she did.
All the air left her lungs when she saw what was in the palms of her hands. Tears sprang to her eyes, but she refused to let them fall and her heart, that needy thing that beat within her, shattered in her chest, making it hard to breathe. The miniature of her mother. The one she had thought lost. Her mother’s blueeyes stared back at her. A lock of fair hair lay in a concave curl at the bottom of the frame. Her beautiful mother, whom she didn’t know and hardly remembered.
Her mother. Stuck in time. Forever young.
“Where did you get this?” her voice sounded fragile, even to her own ears.
“The solicitor had them,” he explained.
“Them?”
“Oh, yes, there is this one too.” He handed her another miniature portrait, this time of her father.
Just as she remembered. Short cropped hair the exact same auburn shade as her own. His eyes smiled, and he seemed so happy. He too stuck in this pose forever. The pain in her heart threatened to burst from her chest.
Tony’s voice broke through the fog of her thoughts. “They were a handsome couple. I see a lot of you in your mother.”
“My parents,” she choked out. Her throat had closed around the lump there. “These are my parents.” Her voice was barely audible, even to herself. A tear slipped down her cheek. “This is how they would have looked before she… when I was a child.”
“She was beautiful,” he said as he kneeled in front of her and wiped the tear from her cheek with his thumb.
“She was, wasn’t she? Do you think… would she have?”
“I am sure she loved you with all her heart. She would never have chosen to leave you.” She fell into his arms, both now kneeling on the rug before the sofa.
She cried in earnest now; she could not have stopped the tears if she tried. A flood of hot salty tears, bitter grief and the great gulf of loneliness that she had held at bay for so long. Tears that soaked his shirt and made her body shake with the violence of her emotions. “But my father did. He chose to leave me.”
“No,” Tony told her in his quiet tone, with the reassurance of his arms. “I am sure that is not true. He must have had a reason. Perhaps he was trying to protect you.”
She looked at him, this shimmering man before her. Could she believe that this might be true? “Protect me from what? What could possibly be so important that he abandoned his child? Abandoned me, when I had no one else?”
Releasing her, he sat back on his heels. “I wish I knew the truth of it, Lucinda. I really do. I have no proof but from what I heard he had done something dreadfully wrong. Something that had put him in a position where, perhaps, certain people wanted him… dead.”
“So, hewasmurdered then.” It was a statement. Afait accompli. “What did he take?”
“We do not know for sure but maybe some information, so important that he sacrificed everything to keep it away from these people. He perhaps thought he would be able to somehow find safety and once that had been obtained he would have come back for you.”
He handed her another kerchief. How many did he have? “Such a noble story. Farfetched, but I guess I will never know the truth of it.”
He smiled, tucking an errant curl behind her ear. “Would it be so awful to think that he died a hero?”
“If it were true, but what if it was nothing more than a gambling debt? Or some stupid wager gone wrong or…”
He took her face in his hands, so she had to look up at him. “Don’t do this to yourself. Even if it were one of those things, what is the use of souring your memory of him when it too could be untrue?”
She twisted her ring on her finger nervously. “That is the problem. I have no memories, not reliable ones in any case.Sometimes I fear I have replaced my memories with fantasies of how I wished it was, rather than actual memory.”
He pulled her into his arms again and held her as her whole body shook with the shock of it all. The reality that she did not, had not ever really known her parents. They were nothing more than paint on a canvas entrapped forever within a frame.
She was grateful he had brought them to her, but at the same time she wanted to throw them into the fire and watch them consumed by the flames until they were nothing but ash, just like her memories. Nothing more than whispers in the wind, as if they had never existed at all.
