Dario had only spent a handful of days with Damian, but he knew full well that this child—he found it much too easy to assume the boy really was his son, and that should have worried him more than it did—was never going to be a silent anything.
“Enough,” he said one morning, interrupting another tantrum. The nanny wrung her hands in the background but it had been Damian who’d picked up a two hundred and twenty thousand dollar bronze statue from the coffee table and thrown it. At Dario’s head.
The fact he’d missed—by a mile—didn’t change Damian’s intent.
Nor did it change the fact that Dario now had a very heavy bronze stuck like a fork into his hardwood living room floor.
“I want my mom,” the little boy said, his face—a perfect replica of every photograph Dario had ever seen of himself and his own memories of his brother, save those eyes that could only be Anais’s—very solemn then, with his lower lip on the verge of trembling. “You said she’d come but she hasn’t come.”
“She’ll be here soon.”
And Dario wondered when he’d become such a liar. When he’d started tossing them out so easily, so readily. It made him wonder what lies he was telling himself.
“I don’t like it here,” Damian informed him. But it sounded like more of an observation than a complaint. “I want to go home.”
“What if I told you this was your new home?” Dario asked.
Most of the residents of New York City would fling themselves prostrate on the hot asphalt street outside to get the opportunity to so much as glance inside this particular building, so famous was it after the number of colorful, wealthy characters who had graced its Art Deco halls at one point or another. And most of the world would kill for a chance to spend even five minutes in Dario Di Sione’s highly coveted penthouse, and only partly because of the view.
This five-year-old who was very probably his own flesh and blood looked around as if he was deeply unimpressed, then screwed up his nose and shrugged.
“It’s okay.” He considered. “It would be better if my mom was here, though.”
Dario met the nanny’s gaze from across the room and dismissed her with a jerk of his chin, then returned his attention to Damian.
“I have something to tell you,” he said. He felt like an idiot. He felt like a movie villain, ponderous and laughable, except he had no mask to hide behind while he did this. “I’m your father.”
He didn’t know what he expected. Something out of a movie, perhaps. Something cinematic, dramatic. The child had flung an expensive bit of table art across the room because he’d wanted a different cereal for his breakfast—surely the news that he had a father at all should make him do...something.
Instead, Damian looked as nonchalant as if Dario had shared with him the news that it was sunny outside today, something they could both see quite easily through the sweeping windows that let in the morning light.
“I know,” he said after a moment, as if the topic was boring. Stupid, even. “My mom told me. She lets me keep your picture by my bed.”
“You know?” He was so dumbfounded he couldn’t quite process the rest of what Damian had told him.
“She said you’re very important and busy—that’s why you never come to our house.” Clearly tired of standing still, Damian started to fidget, working his left arm up over his head for no reason that Dario could discern. He held it there, then began to hop on his right leg. Up, down. Over and over again. “Is she coming soon?”
“Soon,” Dario said absently. He couldn’t quite get himself to look too closely at what the little boy had said, much less what it could mean. “You’ve known I was your father this whole time? Even at your school?”
“Of course.” Damian stopped hopping and looked at Dario as if he was very dim. “I’m not supposed to go anywhere with strangers.”
And then he started using the nearest sofa as a trampoline while shouting out the words to a song he claimed had only dog words, while Dario sat there with an unfamiliar tight feeling in his chest. He didn’t know how to process this revelation.
Anais had kept a picture of him by Damian’s bed? She hadn’t kept the child’s paternity a secret at all?
What if you’re wrong? she’d asked him.
The truth was, Dario had never considered the possibility. Anais had denied it outright, but she would, wouldn’t she? It had been Dante who had made him so utterly certain. Because Dante hadn’t denied it. Dante had stared back at him and said nothing, not one word, his silence far more damning than anything he could have said.
And that had been a very dark time for Dario even before he’d walked into his apartment that day, but what possible reason could his own brother—his identical twin—have for lying about something like sleeping with Dario’s wife?
Still, none of that explained why Anais kept his picture next to their son’s bed. It was something he knew he wouldn’t have done, had their situation been reversed. He would have pretended she’d never existed.
He’d told her it would make him a monster if he was the man she suggested he was. If Dante had lied, if Dario had gotten the wrong idea, if more than half a decade had ticked by like this, rolling on from that single day in his old apartment...
But he knew that was impossible. Dante had been many things back then, but he’d never been a liar—and he’d certainly never looked Dario straight in the eye and lied to him, not once in all their lives. Not even by omission.
Dario knew it was impossible.
Yet somehow, he still felt like a monster.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked himself, almost under his breath. Because he didn’t understand how Anais could be the awkward virgin he’d run after on the Columbia campus and also the woman who’d slept with his twin brother. He’d never understood that progression—and he’d never wanted to hang around and ask for explanations, either. Over time he’d thought he’d figured it out. She’d been so starved for attention, for affection, after the childhood she’d had—no wonder one man hadn’t been enough for her. That was what he’d told himself. That was what he’d believed.
But a picture of him next to a child’s bed didn’t fit in with the character he’d imagined. With who he’d told himself she’d become by having sex with Dante for God only knew how long before he’d discovered them.
He didn’t know what to make of it, and he hated that. Anais belonged in the box she’d built with her own deceitful behavior. This past week had been bad enough. Running into her so unexpectedly in that remote house on Maui, then discovering she had a child she claimed was his—it all required a somewhat larger, more unwieldy box than he’d prefer.
Still, this was worse. This struck him as an act of charity and he couldn’t understand how such a thing fit with the woman who’d callously pitted one twin against the other. Who might have been doing so all throughout Dario’s relationship, for all he knew.
He raked a hand through his hair and picked up his cell phone, aware that calling her was the exact opposite of how he’d normally handle something like this. Why did this woman tie him in knots when she wasn’t even in the same room?
But that was when the housekeeper bustled in, placing a stack of new tabloids in front of him and taking Damian by the hand to lead him out. And instead of calling Anais to thank her for a kindness he didn’t understand in the first place, he sat where he was and read capital letter denunciations of his character in as overdramatic language as it was possible to find.
The ICE Man Cometh—and He Took My Baby!
And that was when another thought occurred to him, much darker than the previous ones.
He only knew that Anais had placed a photograph next to Damian’s bed. Damian hadn’t specified what was in that photograph. Which meant Dario had no way of knowing which Di Sione twin was in that photograph, did he?
* * *
It was late into the night on that same day when the nanny pushed open the door to Dario’s home office suite, startling him
where he sat on the leather couch with his laptop and a tumbler of whiskey.
He hit a key to pause the video he was watching—of Anais on some appalling talk show, playing the part of wounded, helpless ingenue swept into all this darkness by a corporate wolf like Dario. He had to admit she was good at it. She’d almost had him convinced he was an evil, heartless bastard and he knew better.
“I was so sheltered,” she’d said, her voice choked up. “No, he never divorced me. He simply reappeared long after I’d given up hope. I thought... I hoped... It sounds so naive to say it out loud, doesn’t it? But it was all a trick. A game. He just wanted our son.”
Dario had listened to that part at least fifteen times. If he didn’t know better, if he hadn’t lived the truth of things with Anais, he’d have sworn she hadn’t been acting. And even though he knew that was impossible, he’d found himself reacting as if she really wasn’t putting on a show. As if he really had swooped down upon her like some angel of death, six years ago and now, and ruined her life each time.
She has some kind of magic power, Dante had shouted at him a long time ago, when Dario had first wanted to accept the offer from ICE and Dante had been so adamantly opposed to the very idea. He’d made the mistake of mentioning that Anais thought it made good business sense. To make you think up is down and black is white. What’s next, brother? Will she make me your enemy?
But no. The two of them had done that together, in Dario’s own bedroom.
He had to force himself back into the present, where the nanny was looking at him in concern and he had no idea how long it had taken him to focus on her.
“What is it?” he asked, aware he even sounded off. Wrong. Very much like a man who didn’t know if he was crazy or sane any longer, and worse, was almost entirely certain he didn’t much care either way.
“It’s Damian,” the nanny said in a hushed, hurried, almost apologetic voice that wiped all that history straight out of his mind. “I’m afraid he’s sick.”
“What do you mean?” Dario frowned at the woman. “He was turning cartwheels on the roof deck after dinner.”
But he was already up and moving, following the nanny down the guest hall toward the room he’d set up for Damian. He walked inside and found the boy curled up on the bed, shivering and crying and obviously not all right at all.
He was much too hot to the touch, and Dario felt as helpless as he ever had in his life. He sat down on the bed and put his hand on Damian’s small back, as if that might give the boy some comfort. He had a dim memory of his grandfather doing the same for him during some long-ago ailment.
“I want my mom,” Damian cried.
And Dario had never felt worse than he did then. Had he really been using this five-year-old as some kind of pawn? To get his revenge on the child’s mother? What was the matter with him? He’d thrown it in Anais’s face that she was as bad as the father who’d never wanted to marry her mother and had cheated all throughout their marriage. But meanwhile, he was as bad as his own father, the most selfish creature who’d ever walked the face of the planet. He was worse. At least his father hadn’t cared in the slightest about any of his kids—it would never have occurred to him to use them for anything.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed her number, not sure he’d be able to speak past the constriction of pure self-loathing blocking his throat when she answered at once.
“Dario?”
“You’d better come,” he told her with no preamble. He didn’t bother to keep his voice even or calm. What could that matter? “Damian is sick.”
He didn’t know how long it took her. It could have been a handful of minutes. It could have been hours. Time lost meaning to him as he sat there in the dimly lit room with a sick boy in his lap, trying to make soothing noises. He got Damian to stop crying, which made an exultant sort of triumph race through him—far brighter and deeper than anything he’d felt during ICE’s last big product launch, which he’d previously imagined was the pinnacle of his life thus far.
Dario didn’t know how to process that. He didn’t know what it meant, only that somehow this small human who smelled of sweat and something sticky had managed to worm his way into places inside of Dario that he hadn’t known were there. And he didn’t think Damian even liked him. For that matter, he wasn’t entirely convinced he wasn’t holding his own nephew, not his son.
That didn’t appear to have a single thing to do with it.
And then he looked up and Anais was there.
She charged through the door, her eyes snapping to Damian and staying there. She moved so fast her hair flowed behind her like a cloak and she came straight to him, up on her knees on the bed beside Dario to get her hands on the child’s hot cheeks.
“Mommy,” the little boy whimpered. He didn’t seem surprised to see her, and Dario wondered what that was like. To have no doubt that the adults would turn up when they were needed. To expect it. “I’m sick.”
“I know, baby,” she murmured. Her hands moved all over him as she eased him from Dario’s hold. She checked his forehead, his cheeks, and then she clucked her tongue and wrapped her arms around him to rock him. “You have a little fever, that’s all. Do you have a headache?”
He moaned something unintelligible with his mouth against her shoulder and she nodded as if he’d made perfect sense. “That’s not surprising. Let’s cool you down a little bit and see if you can sleep.”
She asked the nanny to get her a wet washcloth and while she waited she stripped Damian out of his sweat-soaked pajamas and then got him into a clean pair. Then she laid him down on the bed with the cool cloth on his head, her movements practiced and easy, reminding Dario without a single word what she’d been doing these last five years. She even curled up beside the little boy so he could hold on to her, and then she sang to him.
It was the most hauntingly beautiful thing Dario had ever heard. It broke the heart he’d thought she’d turned to stone and ash years before. Over and over again.
He sat there on the foot of the bed as this mother sang her little boy to sleep, and it took him long, shuddering moments to understand that whatever the truth was, he wanted this to be real. To be his in all its uncertainty and noise, silliness and sweetness. He wanted her to have come back to him with this funny little boy who was a perfect blend of both of them. He’d never wanted a family—he barely tolerated his own—but here, now, he wanted this family more than he wanted his next breath.
He wanted it almost more than he could bear.
And he could have left when Damian drifted off to sleep, but he didn’t. Anais stopped singing eventually, but she didn’t move, still curled up next to the boy like some kind of fierce lioness who would shred anyone who ventured near. He had absolutely no doubt that she would. And that he’d help.
“‘The ICE Man Cometh’?” Dario asked into the quiet.
“If you ever try to take my child away from me again,” she replied in a very soft voice that did nothing to conceal the steel in it, “I’ll gut you with something a whole lot sharper than a tabloid newspaper.”
He believed it.
They sat like that for a long time, with only Damian’s half-snores filling the space between them.
“He already knew I was his father,” Dario heard himself say. He hadn’t meant to speak. He’d meant to get out of here, in fact—to stand up and leave her here and return to his office, maybe to actually do some work this time. He had no idea why he hadn’t done it. “He knew when I found him at his school. He said you kept a picture next to his bed.”
Anais didn’t say anything for a long time. Dario stopped thinking she would. It was enough, he thought, that they were both here, keeping this strangely peaceful vigil over a sick boy together. Silence was fine. It was more than fine.
It felt a lot like intimacy and, for once, he didn’t balk at the notion.
“His best friend is a little girl named Olina,” Anais said eventually, her voice sounding scratchy. She was propped
up on an elbow next to Damian in the bed, her attention on him as he slept fitfully beside her. “Her father is a fireman on the island, which the kids agreed was very impressive and heroic. Olina told Damian that when she gets scared, her father promised her he’d always be there to fight the monsters or chase away the bad dreams. That she could just call out and he’d come. That was what fathers did, he told her. That was what they were for.”
Anais shifted then, her dark gaze finding Dario’s in the dim light, and he felt everything inside of him go still.
“Damian asked me how he could call out for his father when he didn’t know where you were.”
Dario was stricken, held fast in some awful grip that he thought might crush him to dust where he sat—but he couldn’t bring himself to look away from Anais. Not even to blink.
“I told him that you knew where he was and that all he needed was the reminder of you to fight off the bad dreams and bad things that sometimes turn up in a little boy’s closet.” She didn’t drop her gaze. “I said you were magic. That all fathers were, but especially you.”
“Anais.”
But she didn’t seem to hear him.
“So together we picked out a picture of you from the photo album I have from our wedding day, and then we went to the store and found a frame he liked. He wanted double protection, just to be sure. So it’s a Batman frame with you in it looking very magical and fierce and capable. It sits by his bed, and sometimes I catch him talking to it like you’re real. To him, you always have been.”
Dario couldn’t speak. He ran his hands over his face and wasn’t entirely surprised to find he was shaking.
And she wasn’t finished.
“This thing you did—flying him across the world and whatever you’ve been doing these past few days? Playing daddy games and indulging yourself? I knew you wouldn’t hurt him. I knew he’d be okay. That he’d think it was all a grand adventure with a character he already thinks he knows. You’re as real to him as anything he’s seen on television, that’s all. This won’t hurt him. He’s a resilient kid.”
The Return of the Di Sione Wife Page 11
