Page 75 of Contempt

Lucia laughed. “Probably.”

Lucian shifted on the chair to get a little more comfortable. His gaze drifted to the IV pole, and the bag hanging from the top. The nurses always covered the bag of chemo with a sheath so that they couldn’t see the medicine, and even the line that led to her father’s chest was an opaque white color. She never understood that.

“Well, you’re smiling,” Lucian said, “so I’m going to say whatever it is, it’s not going to upset me too much. Or you, maybe.”

“All depends,” she returned.

Lucian chuckled, and patted the seat next to his, offering it to her. Lucia didn’t even think about it. She headed across the room, and took the chair next to her father’s. It was funny because once she was sitting there, those words that she wanted to say—the questions she knew that she had to ask her father—suddenly stuck in the back of her throat like sticky tar.

They were not coming out.

Lucian waited her out.

Lucia couldn’t speak.

Maybe that was all those years of keeping silent—of swallowing her words instead of letting them out. Maybe it was all that anger and contempt and pain that she’d kept tucked close to her chest like an old friend that felt more comfortable than this.

She wasn’t sure.

“Renzo wrote me a letter,” she finally whispered.

Without saying anything else, she pulled the letter out of her bag, and offered it to her father. Lucian took it from her fingertips, and she waited him out as he unfolded the paper, and read the letter silently. She knew when he was finished because his fingers tapped the edge of the letter, and he made a quiet noise in the back of his throat.

Contemplative, maybe.

Who knew?

“A reply to letters I sent him,” she explained quietly.

“When did you send him letters?”

Lucia shrugged. “John gave me an address. Told me it wasn’t about you, that it was between him and me, you know.”

Her father said nothing.

Lucia wished it was easier to speak.

“Why, Daddy?”

Lucian sighed. “Why, what?”

“You helped him, didn’t you? He says that, even if he doesn’t like the way you did it. But you did—help him, I mean. I just want to know why you let me be angry for all this time. And why you let me hate you. Why not just tell me the truth—put it all in front of me, and let me see what you did. You helped him, got him free, and gave him an opportunity to become something, right? That’s how he describes it. Had you just told me that, and let me see what you had done, then maybe this wouldn’t have happened. All these years, they wouldn’t have happened. Why let me keep blaming you and … hating you.”

Lucian made another one of those noises. “You never hated me.”

“I think I did.”

“Hate and contempt are not the same, dolcezza. Hate is in your heart. The other, in your mind. Sometimes, they might feel like they are the same, but they aren’t. You cannot hate the things you love. You learn that over time, or I have.”

He wasn’t wrong.

She still didn’t know what to feel.

“I didn’t tell you,” her father murmured, “because I wasn’t going to manipulate your feelings, or the reason why you offered forgiveness. And I felt that by giving you these things … telling you everything that happened that you didn’t know about would do that. I would hand you a reason to forgive me, and that teaches you nothing. I didn’t deserve that, either. You have to learn real forgiveness on your own, and in your own time. I can’t hand you the roadmap for it, and expect you to come out of it better.”

“You didn’t deserve my anger and treatment, either.”

Lucian hummed under his breath. “Didn’t I? I only corrected my mistakes when it was already too late. I only realized the things I had done wrong—that I had hurt you and that young man—when it was already over. Your mother and I … well, we were never supposed to step in for our children. Not where love and life were concerned, and I did that with you. I made a mistake. I see it as life teaching me more lessons, and they’re not easy ones. They’re never easy when they come later in life.”