“Thank you for agreeing to see me,” I said to Francesco’s wife, Elena, who answered the door with a friendly smile and invited me inside to a wide entrance hall with a rustic wrought iron chandelier overhead. “What a lovely home you have.”
“Grazie. Benvenuta . Francesco is just outside, resting on the back terrace. Can I get you anything? Espresso? Wine?”
“Espresso would be very nice. Thank you.”
Elena led me into the kitchen, where she stepped through a back door onto a white stone terrace overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. The sunlight sparkled blindingly upon the turquoise water.
Seated at a small bistro table, an old man with thick, wavy white hair swiped at the screen of a tablet on his lap.
Elena touched his shoulder. “Francesco.”
He jumped and pulled out his earbuds. “Cosa c’è? ”
“She’s here.”
With a bony, blue-veined hand that trembled, Francesco set the tablet on the table and slowly managed to rise to his feet.
“Please, you don’t have to get up,” I said, but he did so anyway.
He was tall and slender with a slightly hunching posture. At first, he appeared angry. His bushy eyebrows pulled together into an intense frown. But then he regarded me with wonder, and his eyes filled with warmth.
“Miracolo .” He reached out and kissed me on both cheeks and gestured toward the other chair at the table. “Sit, per favore .”
“Grazie .”
He stared at me in awe, and I felt like a colorful fish in a glass bowl.
“You look so much like him,” Francesco said. “In his younger days. Your eyes . . . like his. It’s extraordinary.”
My heart began to race, and I looked down at my lap. “You’re not the first person to say that to me.”
He sat back slightly, seeming out of breath from the exertion of getting up. “I never imagined I would meet you. If only Anton could see us now, God rest his soul.”
Astounded by Francesco’s familiarity with me—and feeling completely in the dark about the nature of my conception or the reason for my existence in the world—I set my purse on the terrace floor and forced myself to face Francesco directly. “I’m sorry to hear that you were ill.”
He waved a hand dismissively. “That was nothing. I’m fine now, as you can see. But I was sorry to miss the funeral.”
“Me too,” I replied. “I didn’t get here in time for that.” We sat in silence for a moment or two, then Elena appeared with two small cups of espresso. “Thank you so much,” I said to her and took a careful sip before setting the cup down in the tiny saucer. “So you’ve known about me?” I said to Francesco. “For how long?”
“Many years. I knew about you before you even came into the world.”
I sat staring at him, stunned, staggered, and shaken by this newfound connection to the past. “I’m glad I found you,” I said, “because no one in Anton’s family or at the winery seemed to know I existed—at least not until this week. And no one has been able to answer questions about what happened between him and my mother. She wasn’t able to tell me anything before she passed, so needless to say, I’m curious about that.” I gazed out at the distant blue horizon. “And thank you for being so welcoming this morning. I haven’t been very popular with certain family members back at the winery, so I appreciate this.”
“Because of what was written in Anton’s will,” Francesco said perceptively, gazing out at the water as well. Seagulls screeched in a flock as they circled a fishing boat just off the coastline. “I confess,” Francesco said with hearty laughter, “I would have liked to be a fly on the wall when Connor and Sloane learned what Anton had done.”
I regarded him with surprise. “You didn’t like his children?”
“It’s not that. I loved them because they were Anton’s, but they grew up to be very lazy and ungrateful. They expected to inherit the whole world without ever having to lift a finger and without ever giving anything to their father in return, and God knows he tried to be a part of their lives. They must have been flabbergasted.”
“They were,” I told him, “but they’re not going down without a fight.”
He looked at me curiously. “A fight? What sort of fight?”
“They want to prove that Anton was unduly influenced,” I explained, “or pressured into changing his will. They can’t understand why, after thirty-one years, he would leave the bulk of his estate to me—an illegitimate child he’d never met. I’m surprised too. Anton was never a part of my mother’s life for as long as I was alive, and she only told me the truth because she was dying. She wouldn’t share many details. She was hanging on by a thread at that point, so I always assumed it was something . . . I’m not sure how to say this, Francesco. I assumed it was something . . . unpleasant.”