“Why don’t you give me chapter and verse on your relationship with Teo Bontempi’s sister, Mr. Carver? I’ll try to be a good girl throughout though I can’t promise I’ll manage it.”
“Fine. Right. Whatever.” He began to see to the coffee at last, as well as her tea. He shoved the mug in her direction along with a box of sugar cubes. He used the plunger on the press, taking his time about it. She said his name. He said, “Teo.”
“Teo what exactly?”
“It was always Teo. I wanted Teo.”
“So how’d you end up with Rosie?”
“She knew it. I was clear. I didn’t lie to her.”
“What’re you on about?”
“Rosalba knew it was only Teo for me. Everyone knew it. I’ve told you this. We’d been together since she was sixteen. But when Teo wanted me to leave, Rosalba felt like . . . I don’t know . . . She wanted to be a source of comfort, a shoulder to cry on, whatever you want to call it. She wanted to be, like, a confidante. She proposed herself as a go-between. That’s how it started.”
“Seems like you used more than her shoulder,” Barbara observed.
“I didn’t pursue her. She would just show up. Once it started—”
“？‘It’？”
“The sex, all right? Once it started . . . Each time I told myself, Only this once, I’ll do it only this once. And I meant it and I told her I meant it and then she would show up again. What could I bloody do?”
“Not letting her through the door comes to mind. But you did let her in, right? Inside this place? Yes?”
He raised his gaze as if looking for assistance from the heavens, a way to make what had happened understandable and himself blameless. Barbara half expected him to cry out What’s a man to do? Instead, he said, “I let her in. She’s beautiful. Everything about her is gorgeous. She wanted me and she made that clear. And I was low. I felt crushed. And this isn’t an excuse—all right?—it’s just a reason. It’s why it happened. I didn’t love her. I don’t love her. I told her that. I said, ‘This isn’t love, Rosalba. Don’t think this is love. I love your sister.’ And she said . . . God help me, she said, ‘Pretend I’m Teo, then. Call me Teo.’ So that’s what I did.”
Barbara blinked although what she wanted to do was to strike the side of her head like a cartoon character, making sure she’d heard him correctly. “Are you saying she played a role for you? You did the deed because she was willing to pretend she was her sister?”
“I’m saying that was the how and the why. It gave me an excuse to have her in bed and she knew that for me to do it—which she wanted by the way—I would have to have an excuse. And when she told me she was taking precautions, I believed her.”
“Yeah. Well. Seems she wasn’t. She’s told her mum the happy news, by the way. When my colleague was chatting to her, her mum was there. He’d gone to check on some details she’d given him earlier.”
“What sort of details?”
“She’d told my colleague that her parents hadn’t wanted to adopt Teo, that they’d adopted Teo because it was the only way they could get her—Rosie. She told my colleague the deal from the orphanage was take the sister or you can’t have the baby.”
“She said that? Rosalba?”
Barbara nodded. “Evidently, her mum set her straight.” And then she added, “She also didn’t know Teo had been cut.”
Ross looked at the floor, drew in a breath, raised his head again to look at her. “Teo didn’t want her to know. Only the people who had to know or who knew already: her parents, her GP, me.”
“She talked about it on a film, did Teo.”
He turned, poured some of the forgotten coffee into a mug with piazza san marco scrolled on its surface along with the image of a cathedral. He said, “Why would she talk about it on a film?”
“A filmmaker was coaching girls to tell their stories. Their FGM stories? It wasn’t working out like she wanted. Evidently, they were freezing up—intimidated probably—when the camera started filming. So your wife told hers. It’s not being used in the final film—evidently, the filmmaker promised her—but when I went there to ask about Teo, she showed it me. She seemed . . .” Barbara looked for the right word to convey what she thought she’d seen in Teo Bontempi. “She seemed damaged, did Teo. I don’t mean the mutilation. ’Course she was damaged that way. I mean otherwise. It was like part of her . . . her essence? Her spirit? What I mean is that it looked like that had been cut up as well.”