Her father stopped, looking as if Antonio had just handed him the best gift he’d ever had. “I’m so glad you asked! I tried to explain to Lili when I contacted her after Luanne’s death. But she always insisted what was past was past.”
Yeah. She hadn’t wanted to hear his reasons. She could establish some kind of relationship with him not knowing them. But if she knew them and found them pathetic or unacceptable, she wouldn’t be able to go forward in any kind of relationship with him.
Her father clamped her and Antonio’s arms. “Come, please. This can’t be told with dozens of nosy Accardis around.”
Her father rushed them to an old-fashioned smoking room filled with burgundy leather chesterfields, Persian rugs and dark wood paneling. Though everything was authentic and antique, it showed the weight of time and clearly hadn’t had any recent maintenance. Though the three-hundred-year-old mansion was imposing, it wasn’t in the prime condition she’d expected from such an elite family.
After her father sat them down side by side, he stood before them as if to give the performance he’d been waiting for all his life.
Then he began. “Luanne was glorious, very much like you, my beloved Lili, at least in looks and in her brilliant mind. Unorthodox, independent, a trailblazer. I fell in love with her on sight in Saint Mark’s Basilica, as I believe she did with me. She told me she was the only child of a single mother who also worked in the medical field, that all she’d known since childhood had been academic endeavor and excellence.”
So she’d been living her mother’s life. Until Antonio.
“She’d just finished her medical residency and was about to start her fellowship when she discovered she hadn’t actually lived yet. So before she plunged into her hospital work she’d decided to take two years to roam the world. Italy was her first stop.
“We spent every minute together for two weeks until she said she was heading north. I was besotted with her, but knew I’d never see her again if she left, so I proposed. She was stunned, refused on the spot, left the next day. So I followed her, all over Europe. My mother and uncles were enraged. I’d just taken my father’s place in the family law firm, which I’d trained all my life to do, and I left them in the lurch. Then Luanne finally succumbed and we got married in France, but when we went home, no one was happy. Not only had my desertion caused the firm irredeemable losses, but I was supposed to marry to benefit the family. But I wanted none of that. I told them I wouldn’t take my father’s place permanently, that I wanted to leave and be with Luanne and the baby we knew by then we’d made. You, my darling girl.”
Her throat tightening with every word, she leaned closer into Antonio, who intensified his hold on her as if protecting her from her father’s revelations.
Her father went on, his gaze looking backward in time. “My mother told me Luanne wasn’t wife material, would make a terrible mother, that I’d destroy my life and yours if I remained with her. Luanne hated my mother, too, hated all the Accardis and their elitism, hated being in Venice, and in what she called a moldy dwelling fit only for monsters and ghosts.
“When our stay in Venice lengthened and Luanne gave birth to you while I took care of the problems my absence caused, she started believing I’d never stand up for myself or for you, that I’d remain under my family’s boot forever. To prove that only she and you mattered, I set a date for when I’d leave it all behind and go back with her to the States.
“At first, she was ecstatic. But as your first birthday neared and I was getting ready to leave, she began asking me what I would do there while she worked. Stay home and raise you? I knew nothing but the law, but I wouldn’t be able to continue that in the States. My family threatened to disown me if I left them again, which would have left me penniless, but I didn’t care. Then on your first birthday, Luanne told me she no longer wanted me, that I was suffocating her, that she wanted me and my family out of her life. Out of yours, too.
“I was convinced she was suffering from prolonged and severe postpartum depression. I told her so and she broke down. She wept and wept and begged me to let her go. My heart broke, but I couldn’t reach her. I could only say that whatever happened between us, I would remain your father. I had rights to you, and you had a right to me. Her misery deepened as she asked how I would be your father across continents. What would it do to you, always waiting for a father who’d come only when my family let me go? How many times a year would that be and for how long? I insisted I’d manage something regular, but she thought it would only keep her and you in purgatory forever.