“I know.” Her eyes held his and something surged inside of her.
“Is she the kind of mother to them that you wished she’d been to you?”
Willow sipped her drink, thinking that through, even when she knew the answer right away. “It’s complicated.”
“Is it?”
“Well, she’s still Meredith,” she pointed out, with a soft laugh. “I don’t know if that woman’s capable of happy, easy going, given-without-expectation love. But yes. With the twins, she was always…more. More engaged, more…proud. More of a mother.”
His eyes had a shining intensity when they latched to hers. “You must know that’s not your fault.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s nothing to do with you.”
“I know that, too. But when you’re just a little girl—or a teenage girl?—,”
“Or a woman of twenty-five,” he said, gruffly, interrupting.
She nodded slowly.
“It’s hard,” he finished.
“Very.” She looked down at her lap, her thoughts clogged by the strength of her feelings.
“I guess family is something a lot of people take for granted, but not me. I mean, I love my dad, and Meredith, and the twins, but…I don’t really belong with them. To them. I don’t belong anywhere.”
She stared at him for the strangest whisper of time, just a beat of her heart, nothing more, she felt like maybe he would contradict that. Maybe he would say that she belonged right here, in Italy, with him. That maybe he’d promise her the one thing she’d ever really craved, and never known she could reach for until recently: love.
But then, she remembered who he was, what they were, and why that was completely out of reach—and too dangerous to hope for, and it was like the soft rawness of that hope burst apart with all the force of a thousand metal pots being dropped to the sidewalk. There might as well have been a jarring, cacophony of sound, for how she startled.
“Anyway,” she sought for a conversation change. “That’s all very deep for this time of day.”
He wasn’t to be put off though. His hand on her knee squeezed, gently drawing her focus back, and he asked, “Do you think you’ll ever stop caring?”
“Probably not.” Across the street, as if the pain of her past had conjured the image, a mother and daughter walked, hand in hand, over the ancient cobblestones. The daughter was maybe twelve or thirteen, taking her first foray into looking like a ‘grown up’, with a sweet dress and sneakers, her hair styled incurls. She held a phone in one hand, but she was still young enough to hold her mother’s hand in the other. As for the mum, she was looking down with such pride and love that something inside of Willow burst. “It’s like there’s this huge hole inside of me, you know? Like I’ve spent most of my life being aware that I’m not good enough to love, will never be good enough to love. I don’t think it matters who tells me otherwise, I doubt that hole can ever be filled.”
“Willow—,” his voice was raw. Sympathetic. She walled off her heart, instinctively shying away from the idea of letting Francesco make her feel better.
“It’s okay,” she said, smiling weakly. “I’m not asking for you to make it better. I’m just being honest.”
At first, he seemed to fight against that, like he wanted to argue with her, but then, he nodded and reached for his own drink.
“I know a little about grief,” he said, after a long enough pause that she thought maybe he was going to let it go.
She glanced across at him slowly, a feeling in the pit of her stomach that he was talking almost against his will. Certainly, without forethought or planning. “When my mother died, we were just boys. But it changed our entire world.”
Guilt flashed inside Willow. “I’m so sorry. I’ve been going on about my childhood like I’m the only person who’s ever known loss…”
He reached out, putting his hand on hers, eyes stern. “Neverapologise for being honest with me,” he contradicted. “I appreciate you opening up.”
Something washed over her—a feeling that was almost too consuming to bear. She nodded a little unevenly. “You were saying?” she prompted, eyes on his face.
He hesitated again, and she cursed herself for interrupting him. “I know what it’s like, to lose something precious. Ourmother was a wonderful woman, but more than that, she made our father whole. She completed him. After she died, he was completely torn apart.”
Anguish contorted Willow’s features. “That’s so sad.”
Francesco’s lips compressed.