38

38

Aaron's POV

My phone vibrated with a text from Diablo: "Victor made it to Buenos Aires fine. New identity established. He's completely off the grid."

"Quit blaming yourself for Everything My father's voice cut into my guilty musings.”

"Aaron? Do you have a moment?"

Edgar Romano was in the doorway of my office, a giant block of athletic meat that blocked sunlight. My father had a nose for when I was like going through some shit that I’d rather not discuss, and he played adviser across the telephone lines.

"Father. What are you doing here at this time of night?”

"I saw some strange transfers of money today. Large sums being transferred through accounts I don’t recognize.”

Of course he'd noticed. Everything connected to the finances of his family was on Edgar Romano’s radar.

"Business expenses. Nothing to be concerned about."

“Two million euros of business expenses? Aaron, I may be old but not senile.”

I motioned for him to sit, and I had known this conversation was coming. "It was a private matter that needed to stay private.”

“All of these millions for personal affairs, you don’t pay them with a Swiss bank account,” he says.

"This one did."

Edgar looked at my face with the keen vision that had made him one of Italy’s most successful syndicate bosses.

“This has to be about Victor, right?”

I should have known my dad would find a way.

"Victor made some enemies. I helped him relocate."

"You mean you let the brother who betrayed you get away with it.”

“I intervened to save family from an unnecessary bloodbath.”

“Aaron, in our world showing mercy to traitors is perceived as weakness. Victor betrayed you, he betrayed this family, and you pay him millions of euros and safe passage?”

"I didn't reward him. I just solved a problem before it got out of hand."

“The issue is that your wife loves him?”

The boldness of the question took me by surprise.

"How did you—"

"I'm old, not blind. Isabella is more than a little smitten with Victor, and has been since before you got hitched. I thought you married her knowing that.”

“I was getting married to save her from Victor’s machinations.”

"And now you've saved Victor to spare her the sorrow of it. Aaron, when does this stop? At what point do you stop sacrificing your pride and your integrity for a woman who’s never gonna love you?”

My father's bitter truth hurt right because I doubted myself.

"Isabella is my wife. Her happiness matters to me."

"More than your own? More than family honor? You want that, over the men who follow you?"

"Yes."

Edgar groaned and fell back in his chair. “You’re doing the same thing I did with your mother.”

"What do you mean?"

“I was hopelessly in love with your mother, obsessively. And she… she loved me, but not the way I have ever loved her. And I worked for years to earn her affection, to be the man she could fall in love with. It nearly destroyed me."

I had never heard my father discuss my mother in these terms. She’d died when Victor and I were children, of course, and Edgar had never said a word about their relationship.

"What happened?"

“I figured out you can’t make someone love you by sacrificing yourself or worshiping them. Love is there or it isn’t. And anyone who has to force it will only engender resentment and pain.”

"So what are you saying? That I am to stop caring about my marriage?”

I’m saying, you should be realistic about what it is. If all Isabella can give you is duty and partnership, then accept that and stop tormenting yourself with the hope for more.
"That's what I tried to do. I printed out a contract of our agreement and gave it to her.”

"A contract?" Edgar's eyebrows rose. “Aaron, with all due respect, you didn’t reduce your marriage to a piece of paper.”

“I believed it would provide clarity.”

"It creates distance. It communicates to your wife that you consider her a business transaction, not a partnership.”

"But isn't that what we are? I can’t talk to her any other way, and she told me herself that she cannot love me.”

“What is she unable to do today does not limit what may be possible tomorrow. But as long as you treat her like someone who works for you, she will never have the opportunity to see you as anything but someone who paid her salary.”

My father’s words struck a little too close to home. In attempting to guard myself from disappointment, I’d probably just ensured that a big helping of disappointment was all I’d ever get.

When Edgar went, I continued sitting in my room thinking about the agreement she had torn up. Every word of it had been contrived to create distance, the separation of rules and fences that would protect me from being hurt. But in the process, I’d also weeded all my prospects out of any possibility of real connection.

I was going to head upstairs and apologise when I heard Isabella's voice in the hallway -she was on the phone with someone. I approached the door, not trying to listen in but unable to resist.

“Ivy, I don’t know what to do,” Isabella was saying, her voice so heavy with tears. Martin gave me this contract, and it feels like a cage. As if he wants to have me back in his life for good."

It hurt to hear the pain in her voice, it tightened my chest.

“I know I signed up for this, but… it’s not like I expected. So transactional. He is conducting this marriage as if it were a business arrangement, and now I feel even more imprisoned than before.”

She listened for Ivy’s answer with a pause.

“I don’t think so,” she continued, “I don’t think I can do it. Not like this. I considered the prospect of a loveless marriage, yes — who wants to end up like Margaret and Snow?—but what Aaron’s offering is not just loveless, it’s emotionless. It’s a life of rules and responsibilities, no space for anything real.”

Another pause.

"I don't know. I suppose I should have gone with Victor when I had the chance. At least with him I felt something. With Aaron, I'm kind of just gradually dissolving into a role that he tailored me for.”

I withdrew from the door, sick to my stomach. In attempting to protect myself, I’d driven Isabella to regret — to regret staying with me. I’d made her feel stuck and dictated to, the very thing I’d promised I wouldn’t do.

My father was right. The contract was a mistake, it was a wall I constructed out of self-preservation to keep from getting hurt that had only made Isabella drift farther away.

I remained an hour below: I could not trust myself with a book; dwelling on these things. Then I did something that was either very brave or very stupid — I wasn’t sure which.

I grabbed the contract I’d spent hours writing and tore it to shreds. And then I sat down and wrote something totally different.

I tapped, softly, on Isabella's door at midnight.

"Isabella? Are you still awake?"

"Yes." Her voice was tentative, no doubt waiting for another lecture on expectations and limits.

"May I come in? I have got to show you something.”

She answered the door in a robe, her eyes red from crying. The sight of her tears, and those were tears I’d caused, made me want to tear up that original contract all over again.

"What is it?"

I gave her the new document I had written. "What I just told you is a secret. That contract was wrong. I was wrong."

Isabella accepted the paper and read, her face starting with caution and ending in bewilderment.

“This is … Aaron, what is this?”

"It's a new agreement. Rather,  it’s the end of any pact more binding than basic loyalty.

She read from the prenup, “Isabella Romano is free to exit this marriage at any time, of her will, for any reason, without issue or obligation. She is to have provided to her all the means in money of maintaining herself and children independantly. No questions will be asked and no judgment passed.”

"Keep reading."

Should Isabella Romano decide to keep her marriage vows, then it should be because she knows that Aaron Romano is the one that she wants to spend her life with and not out of duty or obligation or some prior arrangement. The marriage will be what we choose together to make it every day, not because we have binding legal script holding us together.

Isabella gazed up at me, tears pouring down her face. "Aaron, I don't understand."

"I'm giving you a choice. One, really real and without conditions or consequences. You can go right now if you like, and I will see that you are provided for in your material wants all the rest of your life long. Or perhaps you’ll choose to stay, but only if it’s genuinely what you desire.

"But our agreement—"

"Forget our agreement. I don’t want you to be here because of some sense of obligation, or because we made a deal.” I want you here because you decide that’s what you want, because there is something in this marriage for which to fight.

"And if I don't? If I can't promise you that?"

“I’d rather you two leave and be happy somewhere else than stay and feel trapped.”

She looked at the paper in her hands, and then back at me. "Why are you doing this?"

"Because my dad just now reminded me that you can't start with obligation and fear, if you want to build something real. And because I eavesdropped your call with Ivy.”

Isabella's face flushed. "You were listening?"

"Not intentionally. But I heard that much, and I know the contract I slid in front of you before made you feel trapped and controlled. And that is the last thing I want."

"Aaron, you're risking everything. What if I decide to leave?"

But then I’m going to feel that pain. "But at least I’ll know you made a choice for real, instead of being forced to stay.”

Isabella plopped down on her bed, still clutching the new form. "I don't know what to say."

“You don’t have to say anything tonight. Take a week. What do you actually want? At the end of a week, if you’re still here and it hasn’t worked out for you, tell me — are you staying or going?”

"A week?"

"A week. No pressure, no expectations. Only a pause to ask yourself what you really want from life.”

I started to walk off but Isabella's voice made me pause.

"Aaron?"

"Yes?"

"Why did you really marry me? The truth."

I turned to look at her, sitting on her bed with the light dimmed, looking young and unsure and beautiful.

"Because, I happened to fall in love with you the first time I saw you at your father's Christmas party three years ago. Because I believed that if I married you, it would save you from Victor's manipulations. And because I had hoped, perhaps, one day you would see something in me that could be loved back.”

"And now?"

"Then I know that love cannot be bartered or forced, or demanded. It is or it isn’t. And I would rather lose you altogether than cage you in some prison of my own construction.”

I ran out of her room before she could answer, my heart racing because I had given Isabella the perfect reason to leave me for good.

But I had given her something much more valuable — the right to make her own choice about her life. And if she did leave, at least I’d know that I had finally done the right thing, even if it killed me in the end.