Chapter 153

Chapter 153


REINA

The IV drip made a soft, rhythmic sound.

I had been listening to it for what felt like hours. Lying on my back staring at the ceiling of a private hospital room with a needle in my arm and a hollow place inside my chest that the doctors had given a clinical name to but that felt, in the quiet of this room, like something much simpler and much harder than any medical term could hold.

A miscarriage.

I turned the word over in my mind the way you turn something fragile over in your hands, testing its edges, trying to understand its weight. The doctor had been kind when she told me. Gentle. She had explained that the trauma, the fall, the physical shock of everything that had happened that night had been too much. That these things sometimes happened even without such extreme circumstances. That it wasn't my fault.

I hadn't cried when she told me.

I wasn't sure what that meant.

I wasn't sure what I felt about any of it. There was grief there, somewhere underneath everything else, but it was complicated by so many other things that I couldn't find its edges clearly. Grief for a baby I hadn't chosen and hadn't been ready for, conceived in circumstances that had unraveled my entire life. Grief mixed with something that shamed me deeply because it resembled relief, and I hated myself for that even as I understood it.

Domenico was dead.

Two days. It had been two days since I had watched him fall at my feet with his eyes fixed on me and his blood spreading across the marble. Two days and I still couldn't fully process the fact of it. The absence of him. The way something that had taken up so much space in my life for so long had simply stopped existing.

I didn't know what to feel about that either.

I didn't know what to feel about anything.

The door opened quietly.

Paolo stepped in.

He was in clean clothes, hair slightly damp, like he had gone home to shower and come straight back. He looked exhausted in the way that two days without proper sleep produces, the shadows under his eyes deep and permanent-looking. But he was smiling.

Not a performed smile. Not the careful, apologetic smile I had grown used to over two years. Something quieter and more genuine than that. Something that had survived everything and was still, impossibly, present.

He crossed the room without saying anything and sat in the chair beside my bed. His hand found mine on top of the covers and he held it gently. His thumb moved once across my knuckles.

We sat in silence for a moment.

"Elisa is stable," he said finally. His voice was soft. "They operated last night. She's going to need time but the doctors are saying she'll recover fully." He paused. "She was asking about you. First thing when she came around, apparently. Asking if you were okay."

Something cracked open gently in my chest.

"Your aunt went home this morning," he continued. "I saw her off. She made me promise to have you call her when you're feeling up to it." A small, sad smile. "She packed you food. It's in the bag by the window."

I nodded. Sniffed. Looked down at our joined hands.

"Paolo." My voice came out rough from disuse. "Why aren't you saying anything?"

He looked at me steadily.

"About what happened," I said. "About your father. About me and—" I stopped. Swallowed. "You know. You've known for two days and you're sitting here holding my hand and I don't understand why you're not—"

"I can't blame you," he said simply.

"Paolo—"

"I can't." He shook his head. "I've been sitting with it for two days trying to find the anger and it keeps coming back to the same place. The same answer." He looked down at our hands. "I wasn't there. I wasn't present. I left you alone in that marriage for two years without an explanation, without the truth, without anything you needed from me. I left a void and he—" He stopped. Breathed through it. "I can't blame you for what grew in the space I left empty."

"That's not good enough," I said. Tears were building now, slow and inevitable. "That's not a good enough reason for what I did. I need you to understand that I knew what I was doing. I knew it was wrong and I did it anyway. I'm not going to let you take responsibility for my choices." My voice broke. "I started it. I went to him knowing exactly what it was. And I kept going back. That was me, Paolo. My weakness, my choices, my fault."

He looked away for a moment. Toward the window. The morning light caught the exhaustion on his face and also something else, something that had been carved there by two days of private reckoning.

He sniffed once.

"My fault too," he said quietly. "If I had been braver. If I had faced what happened to me instead of letting it swallow me whole." He turned back to me. "I should have told you. From the beginning. Instead of disappearing inside myself and leaving you to wonder what was wrong with you." His jaw tightened. "You spent two years thinking you were the problem. I watched you shrink inside our marriage and I couldn't find the words and that is something I will spend a long time answering for."

"I'm sorry," I whispered. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know what happened to you. If I had known—"

"I should have told you," he said again. "That's on me. Not you."

I was crying properly now. Quietly, without the wrenching sobs of before, just tears running steadily down my face while I held his hand and he held mine and the IV drip made its soft rhythmic sound between us.

"I've been seeing a therapist," Paolo said. "For over a year now. I should have told you that too." He almost smiled. "Dr. Linda. She's terrifying and brilliant and she's been slowly dismantling fourteen years of damage one session at a time." He looked at me carefully. "I think I'm making progress. Real progress. Not fixed. Not even close. But moving." He squeezed my hand. "I want to be your husband, Reina. Actually your husband. Not the ghost I've been."

I wiped my face with my free hand.

"I want that too," I said. "I want that more than anything."

He stood slowly from the chair. Then he sat on the edge of the bed instead, closer now, and opened his arms, and I leaned into him without hesitation and felt his arms wrap around me and pull me carefully against his chest, mindful of the IV, mindful of everything.

He held me for a long time without speaking.

"I'm sorry about the baby," he said finally, into my hair. His voice was very quiet. Very careful. "I'm sorry for all of it. I wish so many things had been different."

I closed my eyes against his chest.

"Do you want children?" I asked. The question came out small. Tentative.

"Yes," he said. No hesitation. "I love children. I've always wanted a family." His arms tightened slightly. "With you. I want that with you specifically."

"Do you think we could?" I whispered. "Someday. Do you think we could have that?"

He was quiet for a moment. The honest, considered quiet of someone who wasn't going to make a promise lightly.

"I'm going to try," he said. "I mean that. Not as a comfort and not as something to say to make you feel better right now. I genuinely want to try. I want to get there." His lips pressed briefly to the top of my head. "I think I can get there."

I pulled back just enough to look at his face.

"Forgive me," I said. "Please."

He looked at me for a long moment. His eyes were red but steady. Everything that he was, everything that had been broken and was slowly, carefully being rebuilt, present in his face all at once.

"Already done," he said softly.

He shifted back on the bed and I moved over carefully and he lay down beside me, gathering me against him, my head on his chest, his arm around my shoulders. The hospital room was quiet around us. Morning light moved slowly across the floor.

"Stop blaming yourself," he murmured after a while, his voice low and half-drowsy. "What happened to you in that building, everything that led there, everything before it. It wasn't your fault. Not all of it. Not the way you're carrying it."

"Paolo—"

"I mean it." His arm tightened gently. "You survived him. That's enough. That's everything." A pause. "We both did."

I listened to his heartbeat under my ear.

Steady. Present. Real.

Outside the window the city moved on the way it always did, indifferent and continuous, making no allowance for everything that had changed and everything that had been lost and everything that was, perhaps, still possible.

I closed my eyes.

For the first time in longer than I could remember, I let myself simply rest.

"I love you, Paolo." I whispered, listening to his heartbeat.

"I love you too, baby. I love you more than life."

THE END!