Maria gave me a look. “Maybe it wasn’t you he was thinking about when he rewrote the will.”
I rubbed at the back of my neck. “You think it was my mother, for whatever reason. Guilt, maybe. Atonement?”
Maria shrugged. “Someone around here must know what happened between them.”
I walked back to my chair, sat down, and drummed my fingers on the tabletop. “How did they even meet?”
I thought about Connor’s accusations suddenly and felt a surge of panic. He was, at that very moment, calling lawyers and probably private detectives to help him prove his claim—that some crime had been committed, which would overturn the will.
What if my mother had threatened Anton in some way? What if this was going to get ugly and Connor was going to drag my mother’s past into the spotlight or paint us as gold diggers? Maurizio Wines was a big name. It could be a juicy story back in the US.
Poor Dad. It would kill him to learn the truth that way.
“I feel a little nauseous,” I said and put my head between my knees.
“Can I get you anything?”
“No. I think I just need to find the letters the lawyer was referring to. I need to find out what really happened.” The sick feeling in my belly was still there, but I forced myself to sit up regardless. “Maybe you could help me with that?”
“Sì. I want to get to the bottom of it too.” Maria began to tidy up the water jug and glasses. “Let me show you around the villa today. You should know what you’ve inherited. Later, I’ll ask my husband to take you around the vineyards and show you the wine cellars.”
“Thank you, Maria. I feel like you’re my only friend right now.”
She glanced at me meaningfully. “No one should be without friends.”
After gathering the water glasses onto a tray, she carried them out of the room.
For a long while after she was gone, I sat alone, staring at the wall, thinking and reflecting. What were Connor and Sloane doing at that moment?
Probably not retreating. Not when there was €100 million at stake.
A terrible wave of guilt washed over me. What right did I have to take away their inheritances? Even if they were horrible, selfish children, I certainly wasn’t any more deserving.
I really needed to understand what was happening here. Those letters needed to be found.
CHAPTER 7
LILLIAN
Tuscany, 1986
In the decades following that tragic summer in Tuscany, Lillian Bell often wondered: What if she’d had a crystal ball? Would she have canceled the trip? Or never suggested it in the first place? Or would she have given herself over to fate, regardless of the consequences?
In the spring of 1986, Lillian and Freddie Bell were living in Tallahassee, Florida, and heading into their fifth year of marriage. Admittedly, when Lillian had first met Freddie, she didn’t have it all together. She had suffered a difficult upbringing with parents who were alcoholics in dead-end jobs they both hated. They stayed together “for the sake of the baby” when they should have split up at the outset, early into the marriage, because all they ever did was scream and fight and drink, then scream and fight and drink some more.
Lillian’s father finally left when she was ten. She never saw him again, but rather than feeling frightened and abandoned, she’d wished he had left sooner. Or that her mother had been the one to leave.
Maybe it was something in her mother’s DNA that made her stick by her husband, year after year, enduring verbal abuse and backhanded smacks to the face.
Or was it love? Lillian often wondered. Because her mother did have romantic feelings about Lillian’s father, at least in the beginning. Her mother often reminisced about picnics in the park, chocolates and flowers, and a marriage proposal on a sandy beach at sunset while foamy waves rolled in.
Lillian had no idea if any of that ever really happened, but she cherished those stories regardless, because they made her believe in a fairy-tale world where grown-ups were happy together. That belief carried her through the dark times when her parents were smashing things in the kitchen at night and Lillian was hiding under her bed, whispering soothing words to her baby doll. “Don’t be scared. I’m here. I’ll protect you.”
Later, after her father was long gone and Lillian began to date in high school, her mother advised her to avoid ham-fisted alpha males. “Marry someone soft,” she said. “The kind of man who wouldn’t hurt a flea.”
And so, after a number of years dating the types who fell into the “hard” category and liked to smash things (like Lillian’s face against a wall), she met Freddie Bell on a vacation in Florida. Disney World of all places. After standing in line for an hour to ride the Space Mountain roller coaster with two friends, she had been relegated to sit alone in the seat behind them. At the last second, Freddie hopped in beside her.
“Looks like we’re a matched set of third wheels,” he said with a shy smile. He was handsome and adorably boyish, and it felt like fate, and heaven knew she was a sucker for the idea of destiny. Why? Maybe, deep down, she relished the notion of not taking responsibility for major decisions. It was easier sometimes to go with the flow and simply let fate carry you along. Then you couldn’t blame yourself when the river got angry and threw you up against a rock. It was simply your lot in life.
She and her friends spent the rest of the week in Disney World with Freddie and his group. A month later, she quit her waitressing job in Chicago and moved to Florida to be with him. She felt fortunate because he was gentle and endearing and he passed the all-important litmus test: he had slender hands that were made to hold a pencil, not punch a hole in a wall. He was creative—an intellectual who read books and wrote poetry. He’d even gone to college to study English.
Lillian was, to put it plainly, astounded by her good fortune. She had once heard that women often married carbon copies of their fathers, but she had vowed never to fall into that trap. After a few regrettable, abusive relationships in her teens and early twenties, she’d begun to dream about the polar opposite of her father. At long last, she had found it in Freddie.
Things moved quickly after that. She got pregnant (they thought they were being careful), so they tied the knot before anyone found out about their inability to use birth control effectively. Sadly, however, a month after the wedding, Lillian lost the baby.
A terrible year of grief followed in which she blamed herself for not protecting her unborn child, and she considered it the worst failure of her life. At one point, she told Freddie that she would understand if he wanted to part ways and start over with someone else, since they’d only gotten married because of the baby.
Freddie gaped at her in shock. “Lil, don’t say that. I could never live without you.” His face went pale, and he nearly worked himself into a panic.
Then Lillian remembered that he had his own issues with loss because his mother had walked out on his family when he was five, and he had never truly gotten over being left behind.
Lillian realized her mistake in suggesting such a thing and took him into her arms. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I promise I won’t ever leave you.”
Her words reassured him, and over the next few years, she soldiered on, working the front desk at a local hotel, supporting them financially while Freddie pursued his lifelong dream of writing a bestselling novel.