CHAPTER SEVEN

‘HAVE YOU EVER tried to find your father?’ Alessandra asked a short while later, her eyes filled with curiosity.

‘What for?’ he dismissed. ‘Why would I want to involve myself with a man who abandoned his wife and child?’

‘I get that,’ she said, pulling a face.

He closed his eyes. ‘Your father is an alcoholic and a gambler. He was incapable of looking after you. He didn’t abandon you. He’s always been a fixture in your life. There’s a difference.’

took care of me from the moment I left hospital. My father wanted nothing to do with me—he still doesn’t. He’s never been there, not for any of the significant events in my life. My first Holy Communion    , my Confirmation, the time I represented Milan in the under tens’ gymnastics,’ she said, ticking the events off on her fingers. ‘He wasn’t at any of them. The few times he’s bothered to join us as a family, he won’t speak to me. He’s never looked at me. I was there, I was present and still he

both been abandoned by the people who should have been there for them. For good or ill, it had shaped them both. The distrust and avoidance of love and

more alike than he’d ever

furious passion, the honey-brown a darkened swirl. He’d seen that swirl before, when she’d

had felt unbelievably good in his arms, as if

around him and clung to him, as if trying to burrow under

golden cleavage, below which lay breasts

they look like now? Did

all this trouble in the first place, sitting in that Milanese restaurant, fascinated by her plump

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