search for so long, but everything else would have to wait until later. “I’ll be right down. Thank you.”
I’d have to try and find some time when Alessandro was safely outside the earshot of his family to explain what I had found, or rather, what I hadn’t.
11
Alessandro
When my mind wasn’t consumed by Willow, it was consumed by the other girl in my life, my daughter, Alexis. The barbeque was getting into full swing. Marco and Gabriel were manning the grill, Luca and Molly were stocking a cooler with lots of both alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks, and Stacy was putting together a fresh fruit salad. The sun was shining, and there was a nice, cool, comfortable breeze, and all I could think of was how nice it would be for Alexis and her cousins to be there. Alexis loved gardens just like her mother, and she would probably love the beautiful gardens at the Varasso estate. She’d never stepped foot inside the Varasso estate, though, and she never would. Once things were finished with the Binachis, the manor was going to be stripped, thoroughly cleaned, and torn down. Luca was the businessman of the four of us and still hadn’t decided what to do with the land, but he had been leaning toward just selling it the last time we spoke about it.
I missed my baby.
Being a dad was something I didn’t expect to love with every fiber of my being, but when I first held Alexis in my arms, she instantly became the most important thing in my life. She had her mother’s stunning blue eyes and had somehow managed to get the Varassos recessive freckle gene. Gabriel was the only one of the four of us that had them, but my dad had them, too. Those things aside, she looked much more like me than like Willow. It frightened me sometimes.
Being a Varasso was a curse, and when I thought of that curse snaking up and taking hold of my baby girl, it made me want to distance myself, get as far away as I could get from her, but I simply didn’t have that willpower. I loved Alexis more than myself, and wanting what’s best for her stopped at removing myself from the picture. I just had to make sure I was strong enough to protect her at all costs. It was why things needed to end with the Binachis, but it was also why I couldn’t afford to let some doctors medicate my edge away. If it was the only thing I had that would allow me to protect my family, then I needed it around. Willow didn’t seem to understand that, but I couldn’t blame her. No one would want to see the one they love live that way, but it was for her and Alexis’s own good.
As I watched my family flutter around, preparing for as relaxing an afternoon as we could afford right now, I made a plan to talk to Kelly about having a garden added to the new Varasso estate in Maine. Maybe Alexis and Willow wouldn’t get to enjoy this garden together, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t enjoy one at all.
My eyes drifted beyond the gardens and fountain to the eight-foot-tall topiaries that made up the hedge maze. I would not be requesting a hedge maze to be added. My father used to use the hedge maze to torment my brothers and me under the guise that he was developing our survival skills and making us stronger. Thanks to his tendency to snatch us out of our beds in the middle of the night, toss us into the maze’s heart, and force us to find our own way out, none of us slept well. It started for Gabriel when he was just six years old, but my dad thought he was the weakest of our brood. In a way, he was, but really, he was just the most human.
“Hey.”
I looked up from where I was sitting on the lawn, and Willow was standing over me. “Hi.”
She made herself comfortable next to me, having to sit particularly close to make sure she was totally on the blanket and not on the grass. I’d like to say I did it on purpose, but really, the universe just gave me small bits of good fortune every now and again, maybe because it knew it was downright cruel to me any other time.
Willow pulled her legs up to her chest and set her head on top. “I did some research.”
“Yeah? Anything good.”
As she turned her head to face me, the sun shone perfectly behind her head and cast a golden halo around her. Her eyes were sparkling, and she was wearing a pair of understated diamond earrings I’d bought her back when we were still dating in high school. She never wore too much makeup, too many bright colors, or any gaudy jewelry. I didn’t know if it was her habit forged from wanting to blend in or if she was aware of the fact that her beauty could stand on its own, but she always seemed so perfectly done to me. I would never love another woman for as long as I lived. She was the reason my heart continued to beat. When we parted ways for good, I wouldn’t seek anything else. She was what I wanted, and if I couldn’t have her, I wanted nothing at all.
“Well, the lack of information is interesting in itself,” Willow explained, either not noticing my blatant admiration or choosing to ignore it. “When I Googled Denise Binachi, nothing came up.”
I hunched my brow. “Nothing at all?”
“Nothing. Google told me it had zero results.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah. So I was Googling a couple of other people—your father, Donovan—and I noticed that there was a strong, strange link between the Binachis and the Carduccis.”
That thought struck me as odd, too. Until things went bad between Anthony and me, he’d been planning an alliance with my family. Luca never knew the seeds for that alliance, and could never find anything amongst my dad’s things about it.
“It made me curious, so I Googled Denise Carducci.”
“The cake is done!” As if beckoned by the sound of her name, Denise came walking out of the house with a cake in her hands. It was decorated with white buttercream on the outside and topped with strawberries and bananas. “Where should I put it?”
“Over here!” Stacy called out, and Denise walked over to set her cake down on the table next to Stacy’s fruit salad.
When Willow was confident Denise was back out of earshot, she looked back at me. “I’m not eating that cake.”
I chuckled. “You and me both. I’ll stick to beer.” Willow smiled at me, and my heart grew a little. “So, you Googled Denise Carducci.”
“Yeah, and I got a ton of results.”
My eyes widened. “Seriously? She’s actually a Carducci?”
Willow’s face screwed in frustrated confusion. “That’s the thing. There wasn’t really anything that confirmed that, either. It was just like in every article that had anything to do with the Carduccis, she always also had something to do with it, but the articles never said her last name, and she was usually only mentioned once, maybe twice. Weirder still, she was always, like, just this background character. An informant, or another name that came up, or other little random things like that.”