"Thank you."
"So, to what do I owe the honor of this call?" Lorenzo asks.
"I wanted to thank you for the wine. It's a thoughtful gift."
"It's nothing." I imagine him shrugging. "Does he know you're calling me?"
"I didn't tell him, but yes." I know how this house works. Nothing happens without Gabriele being informed.
"Of course." Lorenzo pauses. "How is he?"
Answering that is far more difficult than it should be. My husband is a complicated man and I haven’t really got a handle on his emotions yet. I’m not sure I ever will.
That’s more than I’m willing to tell a complete stranger so I settle on, "He's okay."
"Good." Lorenzo sounds unconvinced. "Take care of him."
I'll try. I end the call and place the phone down. The room has turned dark around me. I sit for a moment and think about Gabriele. It's like sharing a home with a ghost at times. Some days I would barely know he's there. We move past each other barely connecting. Then in here, in the bedroom, we come together. For now it's enough but I don't know how much longer I'll feel that way.
With a sigh, I lie back on the bed and wait for him to come to me.
FIFTEEN
Gabriele
The last timesomeone gave me a balloon I was about six years old. My mother bought it from a man at the gates of the Villa Borghese. I remember it vividly, a white balloon with a red elephant on it. They were promoting a circus, or something like that.
I was so pleased when she handed it to me because my brothers didn't get one.
Damiano had proclaimed himself too old for balloons at the grand old age of eight. Lorenzo wasn't allowed one because he'd been a pain in the ass all morning, refusing to wear his seatbelt in the car and then deliberately smashing a mirror in the boutique where my mother was trying to buy a dress.
Any other family of our stature would have employed a nanny, but my father wouldn't allow a stranger in the house. He felt it was my mother's job to raise his sons.
I would have said it was up to him to protect his family, but it didn't stop him employing armed guards to do the job. Of course, hypocrisy was the least of his sins.
The balloons Katya has filled my office with are various shades of blue with a few silver ones strategically placed among them. I know without counting that there are thirty of them.
My wife is committed to perfection. I see it in the way she dresses, the attention she pays to her hair and makeup. A woman like her would never be so sloppy as to provide twenty-nine balloons on this auspicious occasion.
As I stand at the doorway, taking it all in, Lukas appears at my shoulder.
"Does this remind you of your father?" he asks.
I turn to meet his look of concern. "What?"
"You know. The night he burst your balloon."
That was the part of that day I was trying not to remember. When we got home, my father yelled at my mother for encouraging such childishness. His sons were to be warriors, not weaklings.
Mamma took every cruel word he threw at her with her usual quiet dignity then screamed when my father backhanded me for crying. He beat her senseless that night. I need to take a breath.
"You remember that?" I ask.
"How could I forget?" He moves past me, into the room, and studies the balloons with that carefully neutral expression of his. "It was the night I realized my best friend's father was a monster."
I say nothing. Maurizio Volante got what he deserved more than a decade ago when my older brother killed him. My mother lived on, dying peacefully in the home she loved last year.
"I went home that night and told my father," Lukas says. "I asked him to do something about it." He purses his lips. "He refused."
