‘Fiore mio? It translates as my flower. It felt an appropriate endearment, seeing as we’re sitting in a rose garden.’
‘There are no appropriate endearments between us, Dom. That ship has sailed.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘You need to start believing it. I will never come back to you.’
‘You would deprive our child of being raised by two parents in a committed marriage?’
Anger unfurling, she whipped her stare to him. ‘I knew you’d do that too, try to weaponise our child against me, so don’t. We both want what’s best for it, and I know this much—what we had was no marriage.’
She waited for his usual denials and arguments. Waited for him to tell her what an excellent husband he’d been and how she’d had everything money could buy lavished on her. Waited for him to make the usual implications that she was a selfish, unreasonable, ungrateful witch.
After a long moment passed, he expelled a long breath. ‘What if I told you I have given much thought to what you said about my failings as a husband, and that I am prepared to make the changes you want?’
So stunned was Marnie at his words that she wasn’t sure she hadn’t misheard him.
‘Since you told me about the baby, my perspective has changed.’ He shifted slightly, his arm brushing against hers with the movement, but he kept his stare fixed forward. ‘I am still angry at how you left me and angry that you waited for the divorce to be finalised before taking the pregnancy test, but the baby is more important than my anger. I will never accept being a part-time father, and I am prepared to make all the changes you require to bring you back to me and make our marriage work. But it has to come from you, too—in the year we lived together, you never told me you were unhappy. I knew nothing about how you were feeling until the night you left me.’
Taken aback at how he’d so quickly and neatly turned it onto her, Marnie’s mouth dropped open in disbelief.
‘Why didn’t you talk to me?’ he asked into the stunned silence. ‘Why didn’t you tell me how you felt? You walked away without giving me the opportunity to make things better for you.’
Bitterness rose so sharply she could taste it on her tongue. ‘This is so you, Dom,’ she said shakily, turning her stare back to the marble Venus. ‘After all this time, you finally hold your hands up and admit to being a lousy husband and then in the next breath put the blame back on me.’
‘That is not what I’m doing.’ A hint of anger now laced his oh-so-reasonable voice. ‘I’m saying that we have spent all this time blaming each other for the destruction of our marriage when we both need to accept that we each played our part in it.’ He paused, shifting his weight again, and she imagined him stretching his long legs out in the way she’d seen him do a thousand times.
‘You know,’ he continued, ‘I have spent much of the last eight weeks scheming ways to force you back to me, but I have also thought a lot about a photo I found in your flat when I was collecting your clothes. It’s the photo in your bedroom of you as a little girl. Do you know, I know nothing of your childhood? I don’t even know who the woman in the photo with you is.
‘You have been one of the most important people in my life for over seven years, and I don’t know you. We’ve never talked, Marnie, not about anything that mattered, and I accept responsibility for much of that. You know I like to keep the personal separate from the professional in the workplace, and then when we married, I had the perfect marriage set out in my mind. I set the tone to make it what I needed it to be, but I accept now that it is not the marriage you need it to be, and I am willing to make the changes so it’s a marriage you can be happy in, but it can’t just come from me. We need to know each other better so we can better understand each other, and if you’re unhappy about something, you need to tell me, not hide it.’
Marnie unscrewed her bottle of water, needing to quench her suddenly bone-dry throat. Her hand was trembling so hard that she missed her mouth and sloshed water down her chin. Rubbing the water away, she forced herself to calm down. Her head was reeling, a hope she tried desperately to contain smashing in her chest.
After a more successful attempt at quenching her thirst, she quietly said, ‘When you say you’re prepared to make the changes I need to be happy…what changes are you thinking of?’
Domenico might have chosen not to bother getting to know her, but she knew him, and she knew how his mind worked. He would have written a mental checklist of the things she was unhappy about and then written the perfect solution beside each one.
‘I’m talking specifically about your unhappiness at feeling like you were only wanted as a baby-making machine and not as a person in your own right—I think I am right in saying everything stems from that. To mitigate this, I am willing for us to share a bedroom. When I travel on business, I am willing for you to accompany me whenever you wish. I have never cheated on you and am willing to promise to continue being faithful. I will also carve more time in my schedule for you and delegate more at work so we can take proper breaks together, and when we do take those breaks, I will consult with you about where we go.’
A burst of despairing laughter rose up her throat as the bloom of hope faded. He could have had a clipboard to tick off the solutions.
Marnie gazed into Venus’s marble eyes and, as foolish as she knew it to be, wished she were real. Wished what she represented was real.
‘You make it sound like a business negotiation,’ she said when she could speak without her voice breaking. ‘But what about love, Dom? Where does that fit with your plan to bring me back into your life for good?’
Chapter Six
DOMENICO DREW INa deep breath and closed his eyes, remembering the night Marnie left him and the sadness in her eyes when she’d said, ‘I want a marriage built on love, Dom. We haven’t even got a marriage built on friendship…’
His mind skipped forward six months, to the night he turned up at her flat and his last-ditch attempt to talk sense into her that had ended in a screaming match. He’d never heard her raise her voice before, not even mildly, but she’d been right in his face, shouting at him. ‘If you think I’m going back to that loveless joke of a marriage, then it’s you who’s lost your mind, not me! I would have given you everything, but you didn’t want it—you never wanted it because you never wantedme!’
‘Of course I wanted you!’ he’d roared. ‘I wouldn’t have married you if I didn’t want you!’
‘You wanted what my body could give you, not whatIcould give you!’ she’d screamed. ‘I was just a walking, talking baby-making machine to you.’
‘A baby-making machine would have had more life to it than you ever did!’
‘Only because you sucked all the life out of me!’
