oh, no. They shouldn’t have found out. Not like that.”
Seeing her friend’s devastation, Hope felt a stirring of frustration with Lucca and Gabi. “I think everyone just needs a little time to process, Maggie. Your children love you, and they’ll come around.”
“Excuse me. I need to call …” Appearing scattered, she fumbled in her purse for her phone, dialed a number, then said, “Richard, I can’t go to Austin. I’ll call later and explain. You go on without me and please, take good notes at all the workshops.”
When she hung up, tears overflowed Maggie’s eyes and trailed slowly down her cheek. If Lucca had been there in that moment, Hope would have balled up her fist and popped his jaw.
“I’m a terrible widow. I don’t follow the rules.” Maggie lifted her hands to wipe her cheeks.
Hope gave her a sympathetic smile and handed her a tissue from the box she kept in her drawer. “I didn’t know there were rules.”
“Oh, there are always rules for everything. I broke a big rule when I was fifteen, and it changed my whole life. I told you about Zach. The little boy I named Giovanni. When it comes to rules, I always find out the hard way.” She delicately blew her nose into the tissue.
“Oh, Maggie.” Hope removed the tissue box from her drawer and set it within Maggie’s reach.
“I returned to my hometown after I recovered from the pregnancy and its consequences. Marcello arranged to meet me. I decided then not to tell him about the baby.” Maggie reached for another tissue. “On my eighteenth birthday, we married. Eloped.”
“Your parents didn’t approve?”
“Oh, no. They forbade me from seeing him, but that was another rule I ignored. I was young and in love. Deeply, madly in love. He was so handsome, and I know that he loved me then, too. We were happy. And when the twins came along, our parents came around, and all was right with the world … except, of course, we didn’t have Giovanni. I almost told Marcello about him when the twins were born, but I knew it would be a mistake. Marcello would have caused trouble. He wouldn’t have let it go. He would have found a way to destroy our son’s happy adoptive family. I couldn’t let that happen. I put our son’s happiness first.”
“That’s what mothers do,” Hope said.
Maggie swiped a tissue across the trail of her tears and gave Hope a tremulous smile. “Giving him up was a scar on my heart. I thought our other babies would help it heal, but they didn’t.”
“I understand, Maggie.”
Hope didn’t know if the note of sincerity in her own voice tipped Maggie Romano off, or if the woman just had a sixth sense about lost children, but she gave Hope a sudden, sharp look. “Do you? Have you given up a child, Hope?”
Hope’s mouth went dry. Up until now, the only person in Eternity Springs with whom she’d shared her story was Lucca. “This conversation isn’t about me. Continue with your story, Maggie. I will tell you mine another time.”
“All right. I just … you
Her heart twisted. “I am.”
Maggie nodded. “Then maybe you’ll understand that as much as I loved my husband, I resented him. I carried the burden all by myself, and even though it was my choice, I held it against him. It was always there, a constant, low-level hum beneath the surface, and it was destructive. So when the twins were eight and I discovered that he was cheating, my bitterness had a foundation.”
Hope actually gasped. Lucca’s father had cheated on Maggie? Whoa. From everything she’d seen, the Romanos worshipped their father.
“I couldn’t leave him. I had four children at home. I believed in my marriage vows … for better, for worse— forever. He said he’d ended the affair, swore he’d never do it again. Stupid me, I believed him.”
“He didn’t end it?”
“He ended that one, but a year or so later, I discovered he had a new mistress. And then another. He wasn’t faithful to them, either. He was a faithless husband, a serial philanderer, a cheat. But I loved him. And I despised him.”
“I’m so sorry, Maggie. Men can be such jerks.”
“That they can. Marcello Frances Romano was such a handsome jerk, so charismatic. His children thought he walked on water. I think he thought so, too.”
“Your kids never knew about his infidelities?”
“No. I couldn’t do that to them. He was a lousy husband, but he was an excellent father. He certainly didn’t want them to know. It would have devastated them. Why destroy their opinion of him? I’d had all the destruction I could handle. Marcello did a number on my self-esteem. My forties were especially hard because he never took a mistress over the age of thirty-five. And by then he’d stopped trying to hide the affairs.”
“The bastard.”
“I did have some pride. I quit sharing his bed. I was seriously thinking about leaving him when we received word about Lucca’s accident. After that, well, it wasn’t the right time. Marcello and I actually got along better during those months than we had in years. A crisis with their children can bring a couple together.”
Or drive them apart, Hope thought.
“Yet, when he died …” Maggie’s voice cracked a little, and Hope reached across the desk and took her hand. “Part of me was glad. It shames me to admit that, but it’s true. I was happy to be free of him and our sham of a marriage. Yet, I ached for my children, so I did mourn him. I mourned the loss of our family, and the young love we’d shared. But at the same time I felt reborn. Of course, that made me feel guilty as sin.”
“We know that life is complicated, Maggie. It’s pretty silly to think that death won’t be complicated, too.”
“That’s a good way to put it. It was complicated. My children were suffering, and I was angry. He’d been so disrespectful of me and of the vows we’d made to each other. Disrespectful of our family. And he never had to pay for it. He never had his comeuppance. He died and dodged that bullet, and I was pissed. And, I had to pretend to mourn him.”
“Complicated,” Hope repeated.
“I was so tired of pretending. They thought I was depressed and maybe I was. More than that, I think I was lost. My sister took me on a cruise, and you know what I did? I had a fling! I had sex with someone other than Marcello Romano for the first time in my life. It was exciting and thrilling and fulfilling—and those wounded pieces of me began to heal. I didn’t want to come home.”
“But I did come home and my kiddos brought me here; they brought me Zach, the missing piece of my heart. It was the greatest gift ever. I started feeling better. Life took on a new vibrancy for me.”
“Eternity Springs has a way of doing that for people.”
“And I’m so thankful my children loved me so much that they helped me find my way here. I have the best children in the world, and I never wanted to hurt them, but they are adults now, and they have their own lives. And I’m only fifty-four years old. I don’t want to live another twenty or thirty or even forty years alone, moving forward but gazing backward.” Her expression beseeching, Maggie asked, “Is that so terrible?”
“Of course not.”
She closed her eyes. “I shouldn’t be dumping all this on you.”
“I’m your friend, Maggie. You can talk to me. That’s what friends are for.”
“You are a dear, Hope Montgomery. I want you to know that I didn’t go looking for a man here in Eternity Springs. I came here to concentrate on my family. But one day, there was Richard. He made me realize how much I missed being sexy. How much I missed being teased and openly desired. How much I missed foreplay.”
Hope smiled weakly. She really, really didn’t want to be discussing foreplay with her lover’s mother.
“Richard is good for me,” Maggie continued, her gaze pleading for understanding. “I don’t know where our relationship is going, if we’re looking at something long-term or not. But I don’t need to know it yet. What I need —what we need—is to have a little time to figure us out.”
She shook her head and sighed. “It’s hard to keep anything confidential in Eternity Springs.”
Hard, but not impossible, apparently. Hope was now convinced that Maggie didn’t know that her relationship with Lucca had gone beyond friendship. No way would she be spilling all these personal beans if she knew that Hope and her son were more than co-basketball coaches.
