kept her face blank, feeling the familiar tug of grief that never left. ‘Fourteen. She battled cancer for four years…’
The truth was that their health insurance hadn’t been enough to guarantee her mother the best of care, and even though she’d been well taken care of there had been time spent on waiting lists that had meant her illness had taken hold and triumphed.
Which was why Rose had had such a panicked reaction to her father’s illness, imagining the same thing happening all over again…
Zac brought her back to the present. ‘And your father?’
Her insides tensed. She hated this ongoing deception. Truthfully, but vaguely, she answered, ‘He’s in upstate New York.’
‘And no brothers or sisters?’
Rose shook her head, avoiding his eye. ‘No, just me.’
‘That must have been rough after your mother died.’
She looked at him again, surprised, and said quietly, ‘It was. My parents were devoted to each other…it nearly destroyed my father…but he had me to think of.’
Her father had lost a part of his soul when his beloved wife had died, and Rose hadn’t begrudged him that.
Feeling raw, and realising they were straying far too close to danger areas, Rose desperately tried to think of something to divert Zac’s attention. She seized on what she’d noticed in the village the previous day. ‘When I went to the market with Maria yesterday I visited the local church.’
Zac sent her a dry look. ‘To repent for your sins?’
Rose fought the urge to scowl, or to rise to Zac’s bait, even as a part of her quickened at this chink of dark humour.
She ignored the comment, saying, ‘My mother was religious and I got used to going into churches with her, where she’d light candles for different friends’ various ailments and worries.’ She continued quickly, in case Zac was inclined to make any more barbed comments. ‘There’s a pretty graveyard by the church, so I went in to have a look, and I noticed that Valenti seems to be a very prominent name here… It was all over the graveyard, actually—easily the most common family name.’
Rose stopped talking when she saw Zac’s hand tighten on his wine glass. He was still looking at her, and she saw him pale slightly under his olive skin. Suddenly he stood up, his chair making a harsh sound on the stone terrace.
Completely perplexed by his reaction, Rose put down her napkin and said hesitantly, ‘Zac…?’
She got up and walked over to where he stood, facing out over the countryside. Dusk gathered around them, lengthening the shadows. Rose felt as if she’d intruded onto something intensely private.
She looked up at his strong profile. And then, before he even said anything, it clicked. This was why he looked so at ease here and spoke fluent Italian. He was from here. This was his land. She could see it now, stamped indelibly onto his proud features. That aquiline Italian profile. She said faintly, ‘They’re your relations… But how…?’
A muscle pulsed in Zac’s jaw, but eventually he said, ‘My father. He was Luca Valenti. Born and raised here in the village. He worked in the local mine until he emigrated to New York when he was twenty-five, looking for a better life.’
Rose frowned, not comprehending. ‘But your parents… I mean your mother…she is—’
He cut in, looking at her now, and said almost accusingly, ‘She is not who you think. Jocelyn Lyndon-Holt is my grandmother—not my mother.’
‘But how?’ Rose couldn’t get her head around it. She caught Zac’s dry look and said, ‘Well, obviously your mother must have been…’
‘Her daughter. Her only child. Simone Lyndon-Holt.’
Rose realised then that she’d never really given much thought to why Zac had taken the name Valenti; she’d gone to work at the Lyndon-Holt house shortly after he’d left and had vague memories of the press assuming at the time that he’d plucked it from obscurity. But it was his name—his actual real name.
‘But how did your mother meet your father if he was—?’
‘An immigrant?’ Zac supplied with a bitter tone.
Rose half shrugged and nodded. She was the daughter of immigrants, so she hadn’t meant it like that.
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, clearly reluctant to speak of this. But Rose was too greedy for information to tell him he didn’t need to go on. This, she was just discovering, was her child’s heritage. Its real heritage.
‘My mother met my father when he was hired as a labourer to work on the grounds at the house. She was twenty-one and promised in marriage to a man from a family of similar standing. She was ripe for rebellion after a lifetime of being brought up in that mausoleum and, after meeting my father, she broke off her engagement.’
There was no mistaking the bitterness in Zac’s tone now, and his mouth was a thin line. Rose suspected that he wasn’t just talking about his mother’s experience and her heart squeezed.
‘By all accounts their affair was passionate, and my father encouraged my mother to elope with him—which she did. They got married in upstate New York, and by the time they came back she was pregnant with me.’
Rose was aware of her heart pounding with dread, wanting to know more but not wanting to know at the same time, because it wouldn’t be good. How else had Zac ended up with his grandparents posing as his parents?
‘When they returned to confront my grandparents—to present them with a fait accompli—my grandfather, who was still alive at that point, told my mother she was dead to them and that if she crossed the threshold again they would ensure my father would be run out of the country, exposed for not having a proper working visa. Needless to say they cut her off from her inheritance and all funds.’
Zac glanced at Rose for a moment before looking away again.
‘My father wanted to bring my mother back here, to Italy, but her pregnancy was difficult so they had to stay in New York to ensure her safety—and mine.’
Rose wondered if that was why Zac had made sure she had access to doctors and a hospital, and why he’d been concerned about her well-being earlier.
He was continuing. ‘Things got fraught. My father was under more and more pressure to earn money to support them. He was working four jobs at one point, and it was while he was on a construction job that he was involved in an accident.’
Rose sucked in a breath.
‘He was taken to hospital, but he had no ID with him and he was barely conscious. He slipped into a coma and it was a week before my mother was able to track him down. The shock made her go into early labour, and by the time I was born—a month prematurely—my father had died.’
Rose put her hand up to her mouth, as if that could stifle the shock she felt.
Zac’s voice was leached of all expression now. ‘My mother was destitute by then—cut off from her parents and qualified to do nothing except be a social butterfly. In her desperation she did the only thing she felt she could do. She took me to them and asked them to take care of me. They told her that they would only take me in and care for me under one condition: if she left and never returned.’
‘Oh, God… Zac…’
But he continued relentlessly. ‘All they cared about was having a male heir. My grandmother had only had one child—my mother—and my grandfather had never forgiven her for that, so they seized the opportunity to restore the balance when they could.
‘My mother left that day and a week later her body was washed up on the shores of the East River. My parents had kept her disappearance quiet, somehow, and her death barely got a mention in the papers. The scandal was simply absorbed into