An Inheritance of Shame - By Kate Hewitt Page 0,34
this to end now.
Not now, but at some point, yes. He would decide to end it at some point in the not-too-distant future, and when that moment came he would walk away just as before. Just as he always did.
She worked steadily through the morning, grateful to scrub and sweep and spray down counters, and not have to think. Wonder. Regret.
She was doing the right thing.
She kept repeating that to herself, a desperate mantra, throughout the next few days. She didn’t see or hear from Angelo, and from the sinking disappointment she felt at his absence she knew at least a part of her had been hoping to, even as she knew, bone-deep, that she never would.
Three days after she left Angelo, Maria found her at break time, sitting alone at a table, lost in her own thoughts.
‘Lucia?’ The older woman smiled uncertainly, a sheet of paper clutched to her chest.
‘Ciao, Maria.’ Lucia did her best to smile and push away the tangled thoughts about Angelo that turned everything inside her into knots of doubt. ‘Did Stefano send you another letter?’
‘Not yet, but I want to write him.’
‘Again?’ Just a few days ago she’d helped Maria write a rather gushing response to Stefano.
Maria nodded, determination glinting in her deep brown eyes. ‘Yes…He’s not so good a writer, yes? So I keep writing, because I love him.’
The simple, heartfelt statement made Lucia still, those tangled knots inside her loosening just a little. I keep writing, because I love him. Maria’s love didn’t change, no matter Stefano’s response—or lack of it. Of course, a mother’s love for a son was different from a woman’s love for a man, but…
Did she—had she—loved Angelo like that? For years she’d told herself she had, yet she’d never sent him a single letter. Not after he’d left at eighteen, and not seven years later when he’d left her bed. She’d tried, of course, when she’d found out she was pregnant. She’d written draft after labourious draft, yet she hadn’t sent a single one. She hadn’t got so far as putting any of them in an envelope. She’d never, Lucia saw now with a cringing insight, intended on writing him at all.
Why?
‘Lucia?’
‘Yes…sorry. Of course I’ll help you write him.’ She gestured to the seat next to her and Maria sat down, putting the single sheet of paper on the table and smoothing it carefully before handing Lucia a pen. ‘What would you like to say?’
Maria smiled shyly. ‘Just that I love him. I miss him. I pray for him.’ Obediently Lucia wrote this all down, with Maria gazing at her neat handwriting in a kind of incredulous admiration. ‘And also that my arthritis, it’s better. In case he worries.’
Lucia glanced up, smiling, her eyebrows raised. ‘Is it better, Maria?’
The older woman shrugged this aside. ‘It’s not so bad.’
Lucia wondered if Stefano would think about his mother’s arthritis at all. She’d never met the man, and yet she wondered. Doubted. She felt her cynicism coat her heart like a hardened shell, layers and layers built up over time and weary experience. She’d been cynical about Angelo for so long, almost right from the beginning.
She still remembered when he’d left Sicily, how he’d kissed her cheek and turned away, heading off into his far-off future. She’d been seventeen, utterly in love, and she’d told herself if he looked back just once it meant he’d come back for her. He hadn’t, and remembering now she knew she hadn’t really expected him to. Cynicism coupled with a rather desperate hope—an awful combination. Yet that’s how she’d always been with Angelo, wanting something she was quite sure he didn’t have to give.
That’s how she’d been with him now, when she’d rejected his offer. What if she’d reacted differently? Would Angelo have been able to change? Could they have a chance, if she gave them—him—one?
‘I hope he writes you back this time,’ Lucia said as she finished the letter, and Maria shrugged, lifted her chin.
‘He’s a good boy. And even if he doesn’t write, he’ll always know I love him. That’s what matters.’
Lucia felt her throat go tight. ‘Yes,’ she agreed quietly, ‘that’s what matters.’
From the shock that had blazed across Angelo’s face, she knew he hadn’t ever realised she loved him. She’d loved him for years, decades, and yet he’d never known. She’d never told him before, and when she finally had, it had been in anger and exasperation, just another means to push him away.
Yet she had to push him away—because