“I don’t,” I replied.
He chuckled bitterly. “Even if you did, you wouldn’t tell us, not when you stand to inherit all of this.” He gave me a seething look before he headed for the door. “I’m calling my lawyer.”
Sloane stood up too. “That sounds like something I should be doing as well.” She followed him out of the room.
Maria let out a breath. “Here we go.” She sat forward and turned to the lawyers. “May I ask, Mr. Wainwright, if this will is overturned . . . is there an earlier will that would take its place?”
“Yes, there is,” he replied. “It was filed about ten years ago.”
“And did the children get the winery in that will?”
“Yes.”
“I see.” She paused and fiddled with an earring. “Please forgive me. I don’t know how to ask this question without sounding self-serving, but in that version of the will, was the little villa left to me? And the money?”
He paused. “I’m afraid it was not. That was a recent addition made in the current will.”
Her shoulders slumped a little, and in that moment, I suspected I had an ally, because Maria would not wish to lose what Anton had bequeathed to her. For the first time since my arrival in Tuscany, I didn’t feel quite so alone.
CHAPTER 5
SLOANE
“How could he have done this?” Sloane asked when Connor ended the call to his lawyer and pitched his cell phone onto the sofa in his bedroom. “We’re his own children. She’s just some person he never even met. Did he hate us, Connor? Is that it? Is he punishing us because we didn’t visit him often enough? Or was he trying to get back at Mom for what he lost in the divorce? Because she did take him to the cleaners. She admits it with pride.”
Connor paced. “It’s not as if Fiona came here to suck up to him. No way. There’s something else going on here. She’s coming off way too innocent.” He thought about it for a moment, then waved his hands in the air and spoke in a high voice. “Oh, look at me. I’m a purehearted angel who knows nothing about my mother’s slutty life before I was born. I don’t know why in the world your father would leave everything to little ole me.” Connor sneered. “Give me a break.”
“She did seem overly defensive,” Sloane replied. “She had a guilty look in her eye.” Sloane sank onto a chair, buried her face in her hands, and exhaled heavily. “This isn’t how I thought this day would go. I thought I would have a soft place to land in case things don’t work out with Alan. You know what it’s been like lately. I thought I could pack up the kids and move here to live, maybe travel back and forth between here and London. Start fresh.”
Connor swung around. “Oh, come on. You’re never going to leave Alan, and you know it.”
Feeling like she had nothing left to lose, Sloane lifted her watery gaze. “I think he’s having an affair.”
Connor stared at her for a few seconds, then laughed. “Seriously, Sloane? Like this is a surprise to you?”
“Don’t be a jerk.”
“I’m not being a jerk. You knew he was a womanizer when you married him. And you must have known he was marrying you for this.” Connor gestured toward the vineyards outside the window. “So don’t pretend to be some innocent little virgin housewife who didn’t know any better.”
He was right. Even on her wedding day, Sloane had felt smothered by doubts and fears, and she had cried in the bathroom that morning before the hairdresser arrived. But she was so madly in love with Alan—rich, handsome Alan—and she wanted desperately to be loved and married and to have children and a beautiful, perfect life that all her friends would envy. It was what her mother wanted for her too. Her mother had walked into the bathroom and wiped Sloane’s tears away and convinced her that everything would be fine. It would be different once they were married, her mother had said, and then she’d convinced her to go through with the ceremony.
Since then, Sloane felt her world continually caving in around her, because there were always other women. Last week she had dreamed of a thunderstorm where the roof of her house was struck by lightning and her attic was exposed.
“Why do you always have to be so mean?” she said to Connor. “Even when we were kids, you used to throw spiders at me.”
“I’m not being mean,” he said. “I’m being honest. And if divorcing Alan is what you have up your sleeve, why should you care that Dad cut us out of his will? Are you just insulted by the principle of the thing? Because you’ll get at least twenty million in a divorce settlement, easy. I know how much Alan is worth.”
“No, I won’t,” she replied, morosely. “I signed a prenup.”
Connor frowned at her. “Are you joking? You didn’t tell me that. You said he didn’t want one.”
“I lied.”
“Sloane! What the hell?”
“Please stop. You’re not helping. My life is imploding right now, and I thought this was my escape hatch. This morning, I had visions of leaving all the gossip about Alan behind in LA and coming here, where Maria would cook traditional Tuscan meals for the kids, and they would help harvest the grapes every September and learn how to speak Italian, and I wouldn’t have to see or hear what Alan was doing with other women.”
Connor pinched the bridge of his nose. “Oh, please, Sloane. You wouldn’t last five minutes without your therapist and your personal trainer.”
“Yes, I would,” she insisted. “I think that’s half the problem. I expect too much from myself. I keep paying other people to make me perfect and happy. But maybe there’s no such thing as perfect, and I think I just need to eat some pasta and not worry about it.”
Connor sat down and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyeballs. “I can’t deal with this right now.”
“Fine,” Sloane said, standing quickly. “I’ll go and take the kids for another walk.”
He watched her head for the door. “You say that like it’s a threat. Oh no! I have to stop my poor sister from this terrible self-inflicted torture where she takes her kids outside to play!”
“Like I said. Jerk.” Sloane walked out.
Returning to her own room, she found Evan and Chloe sitting on opposite sides of the sofa, staring at their phones.
“Hey, you guys!” she sang cheerfully, smiling. “How about we go outside and see if the grapes look ready to harvest? Maybe we could help pick some.”
Evan glared at her with contempt. “They don’t need our help, Mom. And we don’t know anything about grapes.”
“But wouldn’t it be fun to learn?” she suggested, full of enthusiasm.
“No.” He looked back down at his phone.
“Chloe, how about you?” Sloane asked with a smile, speaking in a singsong voice, trying desperately to tempt her. “Want to go check out the vineyard?”
“Mom! We did that this morning,” Chloe replied in that whiny tone of voice that made Sloane want to rip her own hair out.
What was wrong with her daughter? Didn’t she understand how important it was to be charming and charismatic?