THE DON'S SECRET HEIR

Chapter Four: Five Years and One Boardroom

"Mummy. If a pigeon is sad, how do you know? Because its face always looks the same." My son asked me

I did not look up from my laptop. "Pigeons communicate differently." I replied

"But how?" He was not satisfied with that. He never was.

"Do they cry? Do they have actual tears?" He kept asking

"Eat your toast, baby." I said calmly

"I am eating." A pause. The deliberate sound of chewing, offered as evidence.

"But do they though?" He asked half grinning

I looked up.

He was sitting across from me with a piece of toast in one hand and the full look of an inquisitive mindset on his four year old face, and he had my jaw and someone else's eyes and a way of making me feel like the least important thing in any conversation we were having was whatever I had been doing before he started talking.

I closed the laptop and moved towards him

"I don't think they cry the way we do," I said. "But I think they feel things."

He considered this very seriously. Before taking another bite of his toast.

"So they suffer in silence?" He muffled with food stuffed in his mouth

I stared at him. "Where did you learn that phrase?"

"My teacher said it about the class hamster."

He said it with complete calm, like this was an entirely reasonable source. "Is that what pigeons do? Suffer in silence and nobody knows?"

"Andre." I said, searching for the right way to put my words

"Because that would be very sad, Mummy. Someone needs to do something about that."

"Finish your toast," I said. "I need to look at something before we leave."

He turned back to his breakfast with the expression of a boy who had not finished with the subject but was willing to table it temporarily.

I opened the Delaney Project file.

I had been opening it and closing it for three days. Three days of picking it up, reading to the same line, putting it face down again, and finding something else urgent to do. It was the kind of contract that defined a career, my career.

The kind that partners at Mercer and Crane mentioned when they were deciding whose name went on things. International portfolio acquisition. Six weeks on site at Torre Seville.

I had read the ownership chain four times before I accepted that it was not going to change.

DiGiallorenzo Capital.

The first time I read it I put the file face down on the table and left it there for days.

The second time I poured myself a glass of wine at four in the afternoon and just went through the project and tossed it aside again

The third time I said yes to the assignment, because I was not going to let a name in an ownership chain determine what I did with my career and also because he would not be there. Men like Lucas DiGiallorenzo did not sit in on portfolio company presentations. They had people employed for that.

I told myself many things.

"Mummy."

"Mm." I responded without looking up

"You went quiet again."

" Oh baby, I'm thinking."

"About work?"

"Yes my love." I replied

"I want to go to grandma’s place?"

I looked up, while I was not watching, he had moved to the windowside and was now feeding his toast crust to the pigeon I had told him three times not to feed because it would tell its friends and then we would have a pigeon situation.

"You want to go there?," I asked

He left the window and he climbed back into his chair and looked at me with those eyes that were not mine, and something in my chest did what it always did when I looked at him too directly. Pulled. Tightened. Reminded me of the guilt I had been carrying for four years and the reason I was carrying it.

I left him with my mother that Sunday morning. I kissed his forehead and he grabbed my face in both hands the way he did when he wanted my full attention.

"Mummy," he said, very seriously. "Will you find out about the pigeons while you are away?"

"I will try." I laughed

"Promise?" he asked, half cheerful

"I promise."

He released my face. "Okay. You can go."

I laughed despite everything. I kissed him again. I picked up my bag and I left and I did not let myself think about what I was flying toward until the plane lifted and the city below me fell away.

Then I could not think about anything else.

Seville came up through the window on the lowering and I felt it in my body before I saw it very clearly, that particular pull of a place that has never let you go even when you left it. I felt it tightening in my throat and in the base of my stomach. In the way my hands had gone still in my lap without my telling them to.

Five years.

Five years and the city looked exactly the same. Terracotta and gold and white in the winter light, the river a dark line through it, the old cathedral sitting solid and certain the way it had sat for centuries and would go on sitting long after everything else changed.

Nothing was the same.

Five years of distance and silence.

But none of it prepared me for the man sitting and staring coldly on the other side of the boardroom.