Nobody moves.
The garden holds the silence the way gardens do at dusk completely, without effort, as if the air itself has decided to wait.
Rico is still holding the letter at his side. Both pages. Loose.
Emma speaks first.
EMMA: "Dad. What does it say? You're scaring me."
Rico does not answer.
He is not being evasive. He is not choosing silence as a strategy. He is simply not yet able to produce words. He is standing in his garden in his slippers holding a letter from twenty-seven years ago and the words have not yet found their way back to him.
Klaus looks at his father, then at the letter in his hand and then back at his father's face.
He crosses the garden in four strides and takes the letter.
RICO: (quietly) "Klaus —"
But Klaus is already reading.
The garden watches him, Emma has her arms folded, Lucas has his hands in his pockets, Marco has not moved from where Dougie stopped him, still standing slightly apart from the family, the envelope empty in his hand.
Klaus reads fast, his eyes move down the page, his jaw tightens, he turns to the second page, reads that too, then he looks up at Rico.
The disbelief on his face is total, he is completely unable to accommodate what he has just read inside the framework of anything he knows.
LUCAS: "Klaus. What does it say?"
Klaus looks at Lucas, then at Emma.
KLAUS: "It's a letter from a woman, she says she's pregnant, for dad."
LUCAS: "What?"
EMMA: "What do you mean —"
LUCAS: "When?"
Klaus looks at Marco.
KLAUS: "Where is she, the woman. Where is she."
MARCO: "She died. Four months ago."
MARCO: "The letter is from twenty-seven years ago. She wrote it when she found out she was pregnant, she never sent it."
Klaus looks down at the pages in his hand and then back up.
KLAUS: "This is fake."
EMMA: "Klaus —"
KLAUS: "This is fake, someone wrote this. This is a stunt."
LUCAS: "Klaus, let's just —"
KLAUS: "Lucas, a stranger has just climbed over the garden wall with a letter that is apparently twenty-seven years old claiming to be —"
He stops.
He looks at Rico.
RICO: (very quietly) "What is her name."
The question is not directed at anyone in particular. It is the question of a man who already knows the answer and needs to hear it said out loud in order to be certain.
MARCO: "Andrea, Andrea Ferrante."
The name lands in the garden like something physical.
Rico closes his eyes.
Just for a second, one second of absolute stillness.
Then he opens them.
And whatever colour was left in his face is gone.
LUCAS: "Dad. Dad, it can't be real, right? Tell us it's not real."
He says nothing.
Emma looks at him.
EMMA: "Dad."
RICO: (to Marco) "How old are you."
MARCO: "Twenty-eight."
Rico nods. The nod of someone confirming arithmetic they have already done.
KLAUS: "So what are you saying, you're saying you're his son. You're saying you're —"
He cannot finish the sentence.
MARCO: "I didn't know, I want to be clear about that. I didn't know until my mother told me, on her deathbed."
EMMA: "She never told you before?"
MARCO: "She wanted to protect everyone."
He glances at Rico.
MARCO: "She said that by the time she found out she was pregnant, his relationship with your mother had already gone public. She saw it, the photographs, the news,she didn't want to be the person who —"
He stops. Breathes.
MARCO: "She said she didn't want to cause that kind of damage. So she kept it, she kept me, she kept the letter, she kept everything and then when she was dying she said she couldn't take it with her. She gave me the letter and she told me the name and she said the choice of what to do with it was mine."
The garden is quiet.
Rico turns to Dougie.
RICO: "Thank you, Dougie. You can go inside."
DOUGIE: "Mr Santos, are you sure —"
RICO: "Please."
Dougie looks at Klaus. Klaus gives him nothing. Dougie goes inside.
Rico takes a step toward Marco.
RICO: "Come inside."
KLAUS: "No."
The word is immediate and clean.
RICO: "Klaus —"
KLAUS: "Papá, listen to me. We do not invite a stranger into this house based on a letter we have never seen before tonight. We don't know who this person is. We don't know if any of this is true. If this is real and I am not saying it is, then we do a DNA test, a proper test, through a proper process. Not this."
He gestures at the garden, at Marco, at the whole situation.
LUCAS: "Klaus is right about the test. But —"
He looks at Marco.
LUCAS: "If you go to the press with this —"
MARCO: "I'm not going to the press."
LUCAS: "I'm saying if. If this ends up in the papers —"
MARCO: "I came here to find my father. Not to sell a story."
Lucas looks at him for a long moment.
Then at Klaus.
LUCAS: "If we send him away tonight and this gets out we have no control over it. At least if he's inside —"
KLAUS: "We are not managing a PR situation, Lucas. This man has appeared from nowhere with a letter and a story and —"
Rico speaks.
Not loudly, not urgently, just simply, the way he says things when the conversation is over.
RICO: "You look just like your mother."
The garden stops.
He is looking at Marco, only at Marco, as if the other three are not there.
RICO: "Around the eyes, the way you hold yourself, she used to stand exactly like that when she didn't know what to do with her hands."
Marco does not move.
MARCO: (very quietly) "She talked about you, not often, but when she did ,she never said anything bad not once."
Rico closes his eyes again. This time for longer.
Klaus watches his father's face.
And something happens in Klaus's expression that he immediately closes off.
KLAUS: "I want a DNA test. That is non-negotiable and until there is a result I will not accept any of this as real."
He looks at Marco.
KLAUS: "I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want, but I will not accept you into this family based on a letter and a face, not until there is proof."
He hands the letter back to Rico and he walks into the house.
The back door closes behind him, not slammed, just closed, which somehow is worse.
Lucas stands there for a moment, he looks at Marco. At the young man standing in the garden with one empty envelope in his hand who has crossed a continent and climbed a wall to find a father who didn't know he existed.He does not reach for judgement, not yet, he is not built that way.
LUCAS: (quietly) "I don't know what this is yet. I'm not going to pretend I do but I'm also not going to pretend I didn't see my father's face when you said her name."
He glances at the back door.
LUCAS: "Just don't do anything stupid tonight. Whatever this is, it deserves to be handled properly."
He follows Klaus inside.
Emma stands in the garden looking at Marco.
She does not have words yet. She is the youngest person in this garden and the one who has understood the most and she does not yet know what to do with any of it.
She goes inside.
Rico and Marco are alone in the garden.
The light is almost entirely gone now. The garden is dark except for the light coming through the back windows of the house.
Rico looks at the letter in his hand.
Then at Marco.
Then he steps to one side and gestures toward the open door.
RICO: "Come inside."
Marco looks at the house, at the light coming through the windows, at the door standing open.
He steps inside.
END OF CHAPTER 23