“He lied, Theo.”
“Maybe he had reason to,” he challenged and moved to retrieve an envelope from the pocket of his raincoat. He dropped it on the coffee table in front of her. “That’s from Nic. He asked me to come through on my way back from Tokyo and bring it to you. I didn’t read it, but Nic pointed out that he changed his own name to escape his childhood so he shouldn’t have judged Gideon for doing it. Maybe you shouldn’t, either.”
“He didn’t convince Nic he’d married him, did he? He didn’t sleep with Nic and make him believe in a fantasy!” He hadn’t resuscitated Nic’s heart back to life only to crush it under his boot heel. She could never, ever forget that.
“He didn’t take over the hotels the way he could have,” Theo challenged. “If anything, he kept us afloat until now, when we’re finally undoing the damage our father did. He could have robbed us blind the minute the will was read. We all owe him for not doing that. I haven’t slept,” Theo added gruffly. “Call me later if you want any clarification on that balance sheet for Paris.”
He left her staring at the envelope that seemed less snake oil and more snake, coiled in a basket and ready to strike the moment she disturbed the contents.
Throw it in the incinerator, she thought. Theo didn’t know what he was talking about. The difference here was that their mother had loved and lied while Gideon had purely lied. He didn’t love her. That final, odd comment he’d made about his ability to love not being in question had been a last-ditch effort to cling to the life he had built no matter what he had to do.
Thinking of their child growing up in the same hostile atmosphere she’d known made her stomach turn, though. She didn’t want to wield her sense of betrayal like a weapon, damaging everyone close to her.
Maybe if she understood why he’d done it, she’d hate him less. Theo was right about Gideon always being connected to her, no matter how awkward that would be. She would have to rise above her bitterness and learn to be civil to him.
Lowering to the sofa, she opened the envelope and shook out the printed screen shots of clippings and police reports and email chains. Through the next hours she combed through the pieces Nic had gathered, fitting them into a cracked, bleak image of a baby born from a girl abused by her stepfather. The girl’s mother had thrown her out when she became pregnant. A ragtag community of dockworkers, social services and street people had tried to help the adolescent keep herself and her beloved son clothed and fed.
It seemed Gideon had been truthful about one thing: his mother had possessed a strong maternal instinct. Delphi had been urged more than once to put him up for adoption, but was on record as stating no one could love him as much as she did. While not always successful at keeping a roof over their heads, she’d done all a girl of her age could, working every low-end, unsavory job possible without resorting to selling drugs or sex.
Sadly, a nasty element working the docks had decided she didn’t have to accept money for her body. It could be taken anyway. Adara cried as she read how the young woman had met such a violent end. She cried even harder, thinking of a young boy seeing his mother like that, beaten and raped and left to die.
Blowing her nose, she moved on to the account of Delphi’s friends from low places doing the improbable: going to the police and demanding a search for Delphi’s son. Here Nic had done the legwork on a trail that the police had let go cold. Taking the thin thread of Delphi’s last name, he had tied it to a crew list from a freighter ship dated years later. The name Vozaras was there too, but the first name was Kristor.
A side story took off on a tangent about smuggling, but nothing had been proven. The only charges considered had been for underage labor and somehow that had been dropped.
Adara wiped at a tickle on her cheek as she absorbed the Dickensian tale of a boy who should have been in school, learning and being loved by a family. He’d been aboard a freighter instead, doing the work of a man. No wonder he was such a whiz with all things sea related. He had literally grown up on a ship.
Considering the deprivation he’d known, the loss of his mother and lack of—as he’d told her himself once—anyone caring about him, it was a wonder he’d turned into a law-abiding citizen at all. When she thought of all the little ways he had looked out for her, even before Greece, when he’d do those small things like make sure she was under the umbrella or huge things like finagle her into running the hotel chain despite her father’s interference from the grave, she was humbled.
Perhaps he had been self-serving when he’d agreed to marry her, but he’d treated her far better than the man who was supposed to love and care for her ever had.