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“I have something to tell you,” he said. He felt like an idiot. He felt like a movie villain, ponderous and laughable, except he had no mask to hide behind while he did this. “I’m your father.”
He didn’t know what he expected. Something out of a movie, perhaps. Something cinematic, dramatic. The child had flung an expensive bit of table art across the room because he’d wanted a different cereal for his breakfast—surely the news that he had a father at all should make him do...something.
Instead, Damian looked as nonchalant as if Dario had shared with him the news that it was sunny outside today, something they could both see quite easily through the sweeping windows that let in the morning light.
“I know,” he said after a moment, as if the topic was boring. Stupid, even. “My mom told me. She lets me keep your picture by my bed.”
“You know?” He was so dumbfounded he couldn’t quite process the rest of what Damian had told him.
“She said you’re very important and busy—that’s why you never come to our house.” Clearly tired of standing still, Damian started to fidget, working his left arm up over his head for no reason that Dario could discern. He held it there, then began to hop on his right leg. Up, down. Over and over again. “Is she coming soon?”
“Soon,” Dario said absently. He couldn’t quite get himself to look too closely at what the little boy had said, much less what it could mean. “You’ve known I was your father this whole time? Even at your school?”
“Of course.” Damian stopped hopping and looked at Dario as if he was very dim. “I’m not supposed to go anywhere with strangers.”
And then he started using the nearest sofa as a trampoline while shouting out the words to a song he claimed had only dog words, while Dario sat there with an unfamiliar tight feeling in his chest. He didn’t know how to process this revelation.
Anais had kept a picture of him by Damian’s bed? She hadn’t kept the child’s paternity a secret at all?
What if you’re wrong? she’d asked him.
The truth was, Dario had never considered the possibility. Anais had denied it outright, but she would, wouldn’t she? It had been Dante who had made him so utterly certain. Because Dante hadn’t denied it. Dante had stared back at him and said nothing, not one word, his silence far more damning than anything he could have said.
And that had been a very dark time for Dario even before he’d walked into his apartment that day, but what possible reason could his own brother—his identical twin—have for lying about something like sleeping with Dario’s wife?
Still, none of that explained why Anais kept his picture next to their son’s bed. It was something he knew he wouldn’t have done, had their situation been reversed. He would have pretended she’d never existed.
He’d told her it would make him a monster if he was the man she suggested he was. If Dante had lied, if Dario had gotten the wrong idea, if more than half a decade had ticked by like this, rolling on from that single day in his old apartment...
But he knew that was impossible. Dante had been many things back then, but he’d never been a liar—and he’d certainly never looked Dario straight in the eye and lied to him, not once in all their lives. Not even by omission.
Dario knew it was impossible.
Yet somehow, he still felt like a monster.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked himself, almost under his breath. Because he didn’t understand how Anais could be the awkward virgin he’d run after on the Columbia campus and also the woman who’d slept with his twin brother. He’d never understood that progression—and he’d never wanted to hang around and ask for explanations, either. Over time he’d thought he’d figured it out. She’d been so starved for attention, for affection, after the childhood she’d had—no wonder one man hadn’t been enough for her. That was what he’d told himself. That was what he’d believed.
But a picture of him next to a child’s bed didn’t fit in with the character he’d imagined. With who he’d told himself she’d become by having sex with Dante for God only knew how long before he’d discovered them.
He didn’t know what to make of it, and he hated that. Anais belonged in the box she’d built with her own deceitful behavior. This past week had been bad enough. Running into her so unexpectedly in that remote house on Maui, then discovering she had a child she claimed was his—it all required a somewhat larger, more unwieldy box than he’d prefer.
Still, this was worse. This struck him as an act of charity and he couldn’t understand how such a thing fit with the woman who’d callously pitted one twin against the other. Who might have been doing so all throughout Dario’s relationship, for all he knew.
He raked a hand through his hair and picked up his cell phone, aware that calling her was the exact opposite of how he’d normally handle something like this. Why did this woman tie him in knots when she wasn’t even in the same room?
But that was when the housekeeper bustled in, placing a stack of new tabloids in front of him and taking Damian by the hand to lead him out. And instead of calling Anais to thank her for a kindness he didn’t understand in the first place, he sat where he was and read capital letter denunciations of his character in as overdramatic language as it was possible to find.
The ICE Man Cometh—and He Took My Baby!
And that was when another thought occurred to him, much darker than the previous ones.
He only knew that Anais had placed a photograph next to Damian’s bed. Damian hadn’t specified what was in that photograph. Which meant Dario had no way of knowing which Di Sione twin was in that photograph, did he?
* * *
It was late into the night on that same day when the nanny pushed open the door to Dario’s home office suite, startling him where he sat on the leather couch with his laptop and a tumbler of whiskey.
He hit a key to pause the video he was watching—of Anais on some appalling talk show, playing the part of wounded, helpless ingenue swept into all this darkness by a corporate wolf like Dario. He had to admit she was good at it. She’d almost had him convinced he was an evil, heartless bastard and he knew better.
“I was so sheltered,” she’d said, her voice choked up. “No, he never divorced me. He simply reappeared long after I’d given up hope. I thought... I hoped... It sounds so naive to say it out loud, doesn’t it? But it was all a trick. A game. He just wanted our son.”
Dario had listened to that part at least fifteen times. If he didn’t know better, if he hadn’t lived the truth of things with Anais, he’d have sworn she hadn’t been acting. And even though he knew that was impossible, he’d found himself reacting as if she really wasn’t putting on a show. As if he really had swooped down upon her like some angel of death, six years ago and now, and ruined her life each time.
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