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She was pale enough to merge into the white sheets.
He was glad she was asleep. At least if she slept she wouldn’t have to remember, or, worse, feel.
He would gladly give up every organ in his body if it would take away her pain.
* * *
The next time Cara awoke, Pepe was sitting on the private room’s windowsill, looking out.
‘Hi,’ she whispered.
His head snapped round and in a trice he was by her side.
He looked dreadful. Still in the same tuxedo he’d worn to the gallery; what had been an impeccably pressed suit was now rumpled. He looked rumpled.
He didn’t say anything, just took her hands in his and pressed a kiss to them.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she croaked.
His brow furrowed, but he didn’t speak.
‘I keep thinking I should have known something was wrong...’
He placed a gentle finger to her lips and shook his head, his face contorted. ‘No,’ he croaked vehemently. ‘Not your fault. It was a severe placental abruption. Nothing could have been done to prevent it. Nothing.’
She swallowed and turned her head away. Everything inside her felt dry, and so, so heavy, as if a weight were crushing her.
Time passed. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours. She had lost all sense of it.
‘Has Grace spoken to you about going back to Rome with her?’ Pepe asked quietly.
She looked back at him and mouthed a silent ‘no’.
His lips compressed together. ‘Grace wants to take care of you. She thinks you will want to be with her.’
More time passed as she looked into his bloodshot eyes. He really did look wretched, and no wonder. Pepe had lost his child too. He was suffering too.
‘What about you?’ she finally said, dragging the words out. ‘What do you think?’
He shrugged, an almost desperate gesture. ‘This isn’t about me. It’s about what’s best for you.’
Oh.
Somewhere in the fog that was her brain was the remembrance that their relationship had only ever been temporary.
Nothing lasted for ever, she thought dully. Nothing.
She had no doubt Pepe would allow her to return home with him if she asked. He’d take care of her as best he could.
But he wasn’t asking her to go home with him, was he? He was giving her—them—a way out.
And she knew why.
Every time he looked at her he would be reminded of the loss of yet another child.
And every time she looked at him her loss would double.
He’d loved their baby, not her.
She’d loved them both.
‘I need to sleep,’ she whispered, disentangling her hand and carefully turning onto her side, not quite turning her back to him.
She could hear his breaths. They sounded heavy. Raspy.
‘So you’re going to go with Grace?’
She nodded, utterly unable to speak.
It was only when she heard the door shut that the dryness inside her welled to a peak and the tears fell, saturating the pillow.
Incoherent with grief, she was unaware of the needle that was inserted into her arm to sedate her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘ARE YOU SURE you want to do this?’ Grace asked as the driver pulled up outside Pepe’s Parisian home.
Cara nodded absently, gazing at the place she had called home. The place where she had spent the happiest months of her life. The place where the man she loved was holed up, alone.
‘You don’t have to do this.’
Cara attempted a smile. ‘I know that. I want to.’ How puny a word want sounded when describing the desperate yearning that lived inside her to be with him.
But Grace was right. She didn’t have to do this. She could get on the jet that was waiting for them and fly off to Rome. The world would still turn. In time she would heal.
But her heart wouldn’t. Without Pepe she doubted she would ever feel whole again.
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come in with you?’
Cara shook her head. ‘No. I need to do this alone. I want to say goodbye to him properly.’ At the graveside Pepe had looked desolate. She’d had Grace on her arm, holding her up. He’d stood apart from them all, shunning even his brother.
She needed to satisfy herself that he was holding up.
Who was taking care of him? she wondered. His mother was in Sicily taking care of Lily. His brother was already en route back to Sicily, having returned for the funeral. Pepe had rejected his attempts to stay with him, assuring both Luca and Grace that he was perfectly all right, and throwing himself into his work.
But he wasn’t all right. He couldn’t be. The few conversations they’d had to discuss the funeral arrangements had been almost too painful to recall. He’d sounded empty.
His friends, as lovely as she’d come to accept most of them were, were too wrapped up in their own lives to see beyond the tragedy of what had happened between them on anything but a superficial level. And now that the funeral was over, she suspected those that had been there for him thus far—if he’d even let them be there for him, which she doubted—would fall by the wayside.
