Chapter Seventy-Nine
Michaela
Weeks after I called the man who seemed to be my birth father, Adalberto Simone was coming to California. We’d had many chats in the interim, some on FaceTime.
I learned he and my mother met in a club in Milan where he was singing. They had an eyes-across-a-crowded-room moment, a whirlwind romance, eloped, then she changed her mind within days of their honeymoon. He woke to find her gone and that was that.
She’d flitted off to Europe after college and conceived me that June.
Neither of us knew if she’d loved him.
Berto rebounded from his heartbreak to eventually marry his current wife and become successful enough to open the club. She was French, explaining the location. They had three children—boy, girl, boy—so if he really was my father, I had half-sib
