Nina swallowed. “So she…you didn’t know her before? When you were here, I mean?”
I sucked in another impatient breath. “After Rosina’s story, I figured I’d look into it a little while you took a rest. As it happens, my cousin knows Ruggeri, put us in touch, and we talked about the case over a cocktail, all right? It was nothing, Nina, I swear.” Cautiously, I slipped a finger under her chin, asking her to look up at me. “Tell me you believe me.”
She swallowed thickly. “I—” She closed her eyes, heavy with shame. “Yes, I believe you.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. “Good. Now sit down and tell me what else is really bothering you. Because I know it wasn’t catching me having a harmless drink and a polite farewell.”
She sighed and sank to the edge of the mattress. I pushed aside more of her clothes so I could sit next to her. I wanted to take her hand, but sensed she didn’t want the contact. Not yet.
“I felt sick on the way back from the farm,” she said. “I kept thinking the same thing again and again. The girls knew. Their mother knew. I was the only one who didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what?” I asked as gently as I could.
“That I wasn’t special to him,” she whispered, looking down at her hands, which were splayed over her knees. “I thought I was. I really, truly did, Matthew. But instead, he used me, just like he used other women too.” She looked up. “And when I saw you with that woman…all I could think about was that night at the opera when we saw Caitlyn. How I felt then. Like I wasn’t special to you either.”
Ah. So that was it. I knew something was bothering her on the way back from Siena, but I had thought it was just the shock of meeting Olivia’s half sisters and confronting her own guilt. This was something else entirely. This time the shame was mine. Not just for how Nina had felt that night, misguided though it was. And not for Caitlyn either—not after the things she had done.
Right now I felt for every woman I had treated poorly over the course of my sad, pathetic life. Maybe they had used me back, but that didn’t really matter now. If my past with any one of them could make Nina feel like she was less than everything to me…I’d take it all back in a heartbeat.
“I thought he loved me,” Nina said softly. “And it cost him his life.” When she looked up, her beautiful gray eyes were as wide as a cloudy sky. “I know you don’t want to hear about this. You don’t want to hear about when I loved another man.”
She was right. I didn’t. But I cared a whole lot more about her than my own stupid pride.
“You have to let it out,” I said. “I’m not going to hold your first love against you, doll. And what he did…it’s not your fault either. Any more than it’s your fault that Calvin talked you into going along with his businesses and everything else.”
She stilled. “How does that work? I was an adult.”
“You were nineteen, twenty. An adult at that age in the eyes of law, sure. But you weren’t completely grown either. These men saw that. They saw your vulnerability and groomed you to fit their agendas.”
I shook my head to myself. I’d seen enough tabloid pictures of Nina around that age to know just how young she had really been. Doe-eyed, innocent, completely untouched.
Did she need to hear this right now?
Shame curved her body into a crescent.
Yeah, she definitely needed to hear it.
“You were too young,” I said to her. “Barely more than a child. There are people who look for women like that. Young enough to mold them into whatever they want. Vulnerable enough that they’ll never say no. Maybe your Giuseppe was like that, maybe he wasn’t. But the next one definitely was. Calvin manipulated you and coerced you for ten years, baby. But now you’re free. Do you understand? With me, you’ll always be free.”
She looked at me for a long time, like she was digesting my words one at a time. Then with a slow curving fall, like a birch tree felled by a storm, she collapsed onto my shoulder and buried her face in my shirt with exhaustion.
“How could he?” she mumbled into my shoulder. “How could he do that to those girls? How could he do that to me?”
I didn’t have to ask what she meant. Giuseppe Bianchi had been dead for ten years, but the scars from his actions still remained. Nina didn’t just see his ghost in his older daughters, but in her own too. Her guilt was eating her up. It was making her crazy.
“Hey,” I said as I stroked her hair. “When you calm down, I need to say something else. I think it’s my turn.”
She huffed and shuddered again, but eventually, she lifted her head to look at me. “Okay.”
“Do you really think I would do that to you?” I asked, looking straight on. “I know I’m not an angel, Nina, but do you really think I would do that to you of all people? To my own daughters, if I ever have them, God willing?”
She sniffed. “So many do.”
“I’m no saint, baby, but I’d like to think I’m not ‘many’ people either. Especially when it comes to you.”
Her eyes shone like soft gray stars in the outer stretches of the universe. The remnants of her tears clung to her lashes
