After the War: A Novella of the Golden City Read Online Free PDF Page B

went back to live with my parents.”
    It was probably an awkward topic, but he risked it anyway. “Why didn’t you stay?”
    “I . . . Joaquim believed you would come back, but I wasn’t sure.”
    He felt his brows drawing together. “But you knew I wasn’t dead.”
    “I didn’t think you were dead,” she whispered. “I just . . . didn’t think you wanted to come back. To me, I mean.”
    Alejandro found himself gaping. Serafina Palmeira
—
who was beautiful and a talented singer and would be any man’s dream
—
wasn’t sure her husband had loved her.
    What exactly had happened between them during those three days? Apparently there hadn’t been a great deal of talking, yet somehow she’d come out of that time with the impression that he would run from her.
    He went to her side. “I’m back now.”
    She wrapped her arms around him and pressed her face against his tatty jacket. “Please let me stay.”
    He wanted to get to the base of whatever was bothering her, but he would need to do it delicately. He laid his cheek against her dark curls and prayed that he would figure out the right words that would keep him in this life. And her in it as well.
    
    Meeting the children had been chaos. The girls wept over him. His nephew
—
too young to recall him
—
gave him a strange look, followed by a glance at his father, but then seemed to accept Alejandro’s presence as inevitable. The children, on the whole, didn’t seem to taken aback by the fact that he couldn’t recall their favorite games or who had which room, but he had been absent for some time.
    Serafina helped him, occasionally leaning close at the dinner table and whispering some fact into his ear. No one took his gaffes seriously, which was fortunate. They seemed inclined to be forgiving. Joaquim’s wife seemed to struggle the most.
    “I promised your mother I would never let you forget her,” Marina said at one point. “I will have to tell you about her all over again.”
    Ah, now he understood Marina’s worry. “I would appreciate that.”
    “She was an amazing woman,” Marina said.
    Joaquim had told him his mother had arranged to break all the sereia out of that far-away Spanish prison, and had suffered terribly in that quest. “Perhaps after breakfast tomorrow, we can talk.”
    
    Wednesday, 23 June 1920
    That was the course for the next two days. He sat with Marina while she told him all about his mother and the conspiracy that had set her in a Spanish prison in the first place. He had long talks with Joaquim regarding his past. Inspector Gaspar came to speak with him about the hex laid on him. His cousin Rafael came to talk to Alejandro about being a seer, a talent that Rafael shared, and said that his sons would come to see Alejandro eventually. Alejandro met what seemed like scores of cousins and children, all of Serafina’s sisters, and the Gaspar children. He listened endlessly, learning everything about Old Alejandro as if that man were a character in a play.
    Flustered by all the names and relationships, he began making a chart to keep track. He did better once he’d written things down. It didn’t help, though, that Joaquim and Duilio had married sisters, or that Duilio’s widowed mother had married Joaquim’s father
—
or rather the man who raised him. Nor did it help that they all seemed to have children to remember. Instead of a family tree, it made a family tangle. Fortunately, everyone proved willing to chatter endlessly about his family’s past to help him figure it out.
    The only person who didn’t talk to him was Serafina.
    So after meeting with Gaspar again on the third day, Alejandro went to find his wife. Unfortunately, she wasn’t in their room, or the library, or the front sitting room. He asked the footman in the front of the house
—
Roberto, the one with the scar across his face
—
if he’d seen her.
    “No, Lieutenant,” Roberto said. “She said she was going to meet with her sister this