Page 18 of Italian’s Christmas Acquisition

They were silent for a moment. She wanted to push him. Press for more information, but she also didn’t want to cause drama.

“So,” she said. “You’re from Italy.”

“Yes,” he said slowly, as if answering questions was a particularly strange thing for him. “From the Italian Alps. My mother is from a very old, very wealthy family, and she had more money than sense. She got herself pregnant when she was older. And decided to never reveal to anyone the identity of her baby’s father. That was me.”

“Oh. But she... She was very wealthy.” Which she imagined didn’t fix everything, but it had to fix a lot of things.

“My great-great-grandfather was a count, and also a real estate developer. The company had passed through two generations of our family before going to my mother. She did quite well in aspects of the job. Though, in the end, she receded from public life, and did most of her business online. Far before it was trendy for people to work remotely.”

“Oh.”

“There,” he said, his tone definitive. “That is my story.”

“That’snotyour story. That’s a biography of your company, mostly. Why did she end up leaving you instructions like she did in her will? Why did you end up in that position?”

“She was eccentric,” he said.

That only piqued her curiosity further. Because eccentric was not a word she would ever use to describe him. So how had he come to be? And what had she been like really?

“It sounds like it.”

“At the end of her life she did not leave the house at all. We were very isolated. She liked to control everything.” He stood there in the doorway, something reticent about his stance. “If I were a psychologist I would suggest that something traumatic happened to her. But I do not know.”

“Oh.”

Well. That wasn’t fun eccentric.

He hesitated before speaking. “We were quite cut off from the rest of the world for the past decade of her life. It made things difficult. But she always wanted to maintain the level of control that she had in her home. And she wanted to make sure that she controlled me after she died. Hence the will.”

“I see.” She felt she had to stop sayingoh. But she didn’t really know what else to say to this...list of facts.

She could sense that he had compassion for his mother, but there was also anger. A lot of anger. She couldn’t really blame him. She was frustrated that her mom was trying to control her life. That she was trying to take this from her. She could imagine that he didn’t feel any better about it.

“Did you have staff?”

“Two members of staff. That had been with my mother for all of her life. They were elderly.”

“So that’s why you don’t know how to make food.”

“Yes.”

“But you clean.”

“I’m a man who has lived on my own for any number of years. And while I am happy to order food, I like to keep my surroundings in a certain level of order.”

“You don’t have a cleaning staff.”

“I do. But you cannot have your home too clean.”

He looked around the cluttered library, his expression one of pure disdain.

“I take it you don’t like shelves packed full of books? And figurines and doilies?”

“No,” he said.

“I do. It’s history. Knowledge. A lot of this was collected over the years by my family. It’s important to us. It’s part of our story.”

“I will never feel that way about dust catchers, I’m afraid. They do not appeal to me.”

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