“You are young, you don’t understand,” Paco replied. “I’m glad of that fact. As far as I could see, it would do no harm to lie.”
“Well, it has. It has done me a lot of harm. I’m now in love with a woman…” Cayetano turned to Luna. She had tears in her eyes, but she refused to let them fall. “I’m in love with a woman I now can’t have. Your mother’s secret will condemn me to the same lonely life she had.”
Paco turned his attention to Luna. She looked so small next to the two of them as they yelled at one another. He had seen her fire up a moment ago, though – the woman must have had some of Scarlett in her. “Luna, would you like me to drive you back to Madrid to catch the train?”
“Oh, great,” Cayetano scoffed, “now you want to play uncle, do you?”
“You’re my uncle,” Luna muttered. She looked at Cayetano. “I don’t know why, but that makes it weirder. I have no family.”
“You do now,” Paco replied.
“One I will never be able to know. I don’t want to know. Why, if your mother loved Cayetano so much, are there no photos in the piles?”
“There is only one,” Paco said. He leaned into the box, and pushed aside the numerous papers and bits and pieces in there. He pulled a framed picture that had been placed upside down on the bottom of the chest, and handed it to her. “This is Cayetano Ortega.”
Luna held the photo in her hands and took it in. “I know where this is,” she said. “I recognise the buildings in the background. It’s the edificio de reloj in the Valencia port, the clock tower. It used to be for tickets, and waiting rooms, all that kind of thing for the port. The huge building, there behind all the crowds of people, is one of the tinglados, the sheds used for various different activities. Both buildings are there now. I guess this was taken at the port when Scarlett left.”
They all looked at the picture. A photo taken in a moment where he seemed not to know he was being watched, but even so, his stature was tall, strong, confident. He looked pensive, a face dominated by a deep frown and a stiff jaw. Like a man who knew he was about to lose everything. He had thick curly black hair, without the typical very short cut of the time. Both of his grandchildren had inherited Cayetano’s Ortega curls. What an awful thought.
“Can I pick up my mother’s things now?” Paco asked.
“I’ll do it, Papá,” Cayetano snapped. “Please, can you just leave us? You have done enough damage. Happy now?”
“Of course I’m not happy,” Paco said. His deep voice had begun to shake in anguish again. “Why would I have ever thought that this day would come? Scarlett went to the other side of the world. Who would ever consider something like this happening?”
Luna frowned; she could hear crying down the hallway. All the yelling had woken one of the boys. No one ever wanted to wake in the dark of a strange room to hear angry voices. “I’m going to get the kids up,” she said. “We need to leave, it’s not our place to be here anymore.”
Cayetano watched her leave the room, and wiped the tears from his face. He didn’t care what his father thought of him crying over a woman. “Have your damn chest,” he said, and went after Luna.
Cayetano stopped Luna just as she went to open the bedroom door. He gently pulled her away and into his bedroom across the hallway. “Luna, please, you don’t need to leave.”
“I think we do. I think enough has happened here tonight.”
“We haven’t even heard half the story! What if Papá is wrong?”
“What if he’s right?”
“So, what, you are just giving up on me?”
“Look me in the eye and tell you don’t find the concept of you and I sleeping together and being closely related as utterly disgusting.”
Cayetano couldn’t do that. It was a sickening thought. He had plenty of cousins, and the thought of laying a hand on them would never enter his mind. “We are only half-cousins…”
“Meaning?”
“Maybe no one will ever find out.”
“We know; we will always know. I want to go back to Madrid, please. I need to stop Enzo crying.”
“Let me drive you back to Valencia,” Cayetano stopped her. She wiped the tears off her pale cheeks. “Please.”
Luna stepped past him and crossed the hallway, and opened the children’s door. “All right,” she muttered. Her heart felt heavy in her chest. She didn’t want to give him up. She had only had the information a matter of minutes, but already, they both knew that the happy future their minds had been entertaining was never going to happen.
23
Valencia, España ~ Octobre de 2009
Luna coughed while she sat in the dark of her living room. It was an unusually cold October night in Valencia. Once the boys were asleep in their beds, she sat down on the couch with a bottle of wine and Fabrizio’s ashes. Cuddling something as basic as a varnished box seemed ridiculous, but as night crept up on her, it felt more comforting. She had done it many times before, to let her tears fall onto the dark brown box while she held it. It didn’t matter how often she spoke to her husband, there was no relief from her pain. Not once.
“Non ho dimenticato il mio italiano,” she said to herself in the dark. I haven’t forgotten my Italian. She only spoke it for her husband. She missed the sound of his voice, the brisk way he spoke in his mother tongue. He had painstakingly taught her Italian, and also Spanish once they moved to Valencia. Fabrizio had taken such loving care of his family. Luna had been so blissfully happy. One thing always remained in her mind, though – she was never his equal. That was the difference between Fabrizio and Cayetano – when she was with Cayetano, he treated her like the most precious thing in the world, a force to be reckoned with, a woman who he was lucky to have, and wanted to get to know. That had gone forever, just like her husband.
“I miss you,” she said to the box. “You were so good to me, and now I don’t know what I’m meant to do for the rest of my life.” Luna had said that to the box a thousand times before. How was she supposed to live on her own? How was she supposed to raise sons with no father? In stronger moments, which became more and more often as time passed, she could hold her head up and tell herself that she could manage, but on dark, lonely nights, the doubt crept in. The dependence on him crept in.
“I’ve made such a stupid mistake,” she whispered. “I did something so stupid.” She couldn’t say it out loud – I fell in love with another man. Not only that, she told him that she loved him. She let him into Giacomo and Enzo’s lives. Now, combined with losing her job, she had nothing. Luna was a fool to think she was over Fabrizio – she wasn’t. It was still too soon. The third anniversary of his death was fast approaching, and she feared she would never get over what had happened to her Italian prince. She would never accept it, never come to terms with it, never stop being angry. Falling on her face with Cayetano only served to remind her that things were never going to be okay.
Luna glanced at the coffee table between her and the full-length windows that separated her isolation from the dark park across the street. Her bottle of wine was empty, and she was drunk. Luna could do many things, but hold her drink was not one of them. She had a rule - she could only drink if there was a sober adult in the house. She and Darren took turns at being able to have a glass of wine over dinner, if they so desired. There always needed to be a sober adult in case of an emergency with the boys, Luna always insisted. But now Darren wasn’t here anymore. She had driven him away over a man she could never have. She couldn’t blame him for being so hurt.
Luna placed the ashes box down on the coffee table and reached out for her bag that sat on the armchair. She pulled out her phone and looked at it; the bright screen hurt her eyes in the dark. Come to me, Cayetano, let’s run away. No one will ever find out. She couldn’t say that. He was her cousin, their fathers were brothers. Half-brothers. None of that stopped how she felt about the man she hadn’t spoken to in three weeks now. He had driven her and the boys back home to Valencia, barely a word spoken bet
ween them. Since then, she had wanted to talk to him, but there was a sense of shame in it. They couldn’t be together anymore, and that meant they couldn’t even speak. He hadn’t called her, not once. He must have felt the same way she did.
I’m drunk. That was all the message she sent said. She must have been drunk to write something that pointless and send it off. Luna tossed the phone on the coffee table and picked the ashes box up again. The thought of sitting home alone and depressed again was a scary thought. But having sex with your own cousin wasn’t exactly a terrific way to move on with your life. Making love to your cousin. Passionate love. She shivered in the dark; when Luna made a mistake she certainly went all out. She didn’t only hurt for the life she had lost with Fabrizio, she was hurting for the life she had imagined with Cayetano that she wouldn’t have. She was ashamed of herself for the fact. She should have only thought of Fabrizio. You are not meant to get over your great love. You are not meant to fall in love a second time. You betray one man by loving another.
It wasn’t long before Luna heard the sound of keys in the front door to her apartment. She didn’t bother to turn in her seat when she heard the door open and close. A tiny bit of light pierced the dark with the flick of the lamp out in the entranceway. “I’m drunk?” Darren’s voice said behind her.
Luna glanced up when he rounded the side of the couch to stand in front of her. She watched him sigh as he looked at her with the ashes on her lap, with the weight of life’s disappointments on her slumped shoulders. “Yep.”
Darren shrugged off his coat and tossed it on the armchair. “What happened to one sober adult?”
“It’s hard to do when you’re on your own, and such an asshole that you have no choice but to drink because you fucked your whole life up.”
Darren sat down next to her, and looked at the box in her hands. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m here in the dark, thinking of all the stupid things I have ever done. Like yelling at you and kicking you out of the house.”
“I hit you. I deserved it,” Darren said. “I didn’t expect to hear from you any time soon.”
“Where have you been?”
“At Santiago and Abril’s place around the corner. I will clear out the rest of my stuff here soon. I’m going back to Australia.”
“What?” Luna turned to him with a frown. “You love it here!”
“Only for a holiday. It will be warm down there, and I can relax while it’s the off-season for riding up here. I haven’t been home in a while. My family will wonder why the woman of my dreams never came along.”
“Because she doesn’t deserve you,” Luna mumbled. “The kids miss you.”
“I miss them. Very much so.”
“They have no idea what’s going on. I didn’t know what to tell them.”
“Leave their innocence alone.” He tucked his arm around her and let her lean against him.
“Life does make a habit of sucking out the innocence of our existence.”
“It does for us.”
“The innocence of the past is like a whisper in a dream.”
“But do you wish to be the woman you used to be?”
“I wasn’t a woman, I was a girl. A girl swept along with whatever she liked. “Finding I was pregnant ended that carefree existence.”
“But look what you have.”
“I know, I know, I don’t regret it at all. I never have. I had twin boys, to my husband who I adored so, so much. I don’t wish my time over again.”
“What has happened makes you who you are.”
“Tough lessons to learn,” she sighed. “Who would have imagined that ten years ago, Fabrizio would be dead and we would be like this.”
“Imagine what we will be like in another ten years.”
“Giacomo and Enzo will be teenagers, and you will have won the Tour de France.”
“Thanks for your optimism! What about you?”
“I have no idea.”
“That’s the beauty, Lulu. You can be anything. You still have a lot of life ahead of you, no matter what you have already been through.”
“It’s hard to imagine a future.”
“Isn’t that what an affair with a married bullfighter is for?”
“There’s no affair. Not anymore.”
“I see,” Darren said softly. “So you aren’t missing Fabrizio as usual. This is a new problem.”
“It’s me full of regret for making a big mistake.” It hurt to say it; it wasn’t a mistake, it was a disaster. She loved Cayetano and didn’t want to admit it to Darren. “I’m sorry.”
“I couldn’t believe it, you know. You have been seeing someone else and didn’t even tell me. Here I was, with you and the boys, and you are off with a guy you barely know, and having him around the kids as well.”
“I didn’t know what to say to you at the time, that’s why I kept it quiet.”
“I was in love with you. Always have been.”
“I know. But I wasn’t single until now.”
“I know, trust me, I know. I watched you marry Fabrizio. I saw you have kids with him. I saw you go through hell with his death. I couldn’t say a word after he died. I held off because I thought you weren’t ready to move on yet. The right time didn’t come. Then all of a sudden you started a fling with a man you didn’t know.”
“I did something that was out of character. And for the first time in a while, I felt alive.”
“Was it that the rest of us were not enough anymore?”
“Of course not,” Luna replied and she turned to face him. “I’m not saying what you have done for me and the kids isn’t enough. It always was. Cayetano didn’t know who I was. He didn’t look at me with pity. Poor broken Luna, everyone needs to hold her hand. I was just me, not the single mother, not the widow. A woman.”
Darren nodded as he listened. “I did what I thought was the right thing to do.”
“And you did everything right.” Luna paused and saw the defeated look on his face. “You know, there were plenty of times after Fabrizio died that I thought about moving on… with you. I thought about it a lot. When you were with me, even more when you were away…”
“I have been with you most of our adult lives. I know everything about you. I was there for all the key moments for the boys. After Fabrizio passed away, I considered the boys my sons. I considered you my girlfriend. I never even looked at another woman because I had a family.”
“I feel as if I have cheated on you.”
“You have been, in a weird kind of way.”
“Yeah, I have. I had feelings for you, but I slept with Cayetano anyway.”
“But you didn’t pick me.”
“I’m not picking anyone. It’s time for me to make a change in my life. It doesn’t include Cayetano.”
“But you and I, we’re too complicated.”
“I guess we both just need to move on.”
“We have broken up, haven’t we?”
“We have, and it’s slow and painful. But at least it’s over.” Luna lifted her head from his shoulder to look at him. He sat steady as she leaned forward and kissed him on the lips, a slow and gentle kiss which he gratefully responded to. She wrapped her arms around him, and the two of them sat in silence.
“Lulu, you get depressed and soppy on alcohol.”
“Yep, I do,” she sighed. “Do you want to stay the night?”
Darren paused for a moment. “Okay, yeah. I can see Giacomo and Enzo in the morning.”
“When did we become adults?”
“Around the time you were a single mother of two and I felt the need to be your hero. Hey, how about a night out?”
“What, now?”
“Why not? I can go and see if Lucía is home across the hallway. You know she loves the kids and offers to babysit.”
“Poor girl needs the cash.”
“And the boys are fast asleep. They will never know the difference. How about you and me head into the old town? A few of the guy
s are there tonight, maybe we can meet up with them.”
“I don’t know,” Luna groaned. She hadn’t been out for an evening out in the Carmen district in a long time. She had drunk enough wine for it to sound like a good idea.
“Come on, how bad could it be?”
24
Valencia, España ~ Octobre de 2009
The evening never had a chance. Only a few hours ago she told Darren how much she didn’t want her old life back, and now Luna stood with him in a little bar deep in the Barrio del Carmen, the historical quarter in the heart of Valencia’s old town. They were surrounded by his cycling teammates, all happy to be finished work for the Christmas break. It was just after midnight, so the area was just winding up, the bar full with people.
“That face is too beautiful to be sad,” Darren said to her.
Luna glanced over and threw him a look. The tiny place was full, and the pair stood shoulder to shoulder among the noisy crowd in the dark building. “Very funny.”
“Come on, you got dressed up, got Lucía to babysit, let’s have a good time! Don’t we deserve a little happiness now and then, even if it’s just a night out for drinks?”
Luna playfully saluted her friend as he disappeared off through the crowd. She couldn’t deny that the wine in her system relaxed her. She shrugged; her top slipped on her thin frame. It was backless and just hung on her. It wasn’t a great choice at this cold time of the year, but it made her feel feminine. After losing so much weight when Fabrizio died, she had finally started to get a figure back, and why wouldn’t she be able to show it off? She was single now, and a single girl could do whatever she liked.. She would rather be dressed casual, tracking down Cayetano Ortega, wherever he might be buried.
“Looking stylish tonight, Mrs. Merlini.”
Luna rolled her eyes. Paul was one of Darren’s lead-out riders during his disappointing Tour de France campaign a few months ago. First-class wanker. “Hello, Paul.”
Secrets of Spain Trilogy Page 26