“That was the stated goal.”
Emily handed the phone back more slowly than necessary. “Thank you.”
I looked at her for a long second before asking the question that had been sitting in my chest since she said no.
“There is hope for us still, isn’t there?”
She stilled.
I kept my voice even, the effort costing me something. “I know you still love me.”
Her gaze sharpened. “That’s a dangerous amount of confidence for a man in your position.”
“It isn’t confidence. It’s observation.”
She looked away first, which was answer enough.
“What would it take?” I asked quietly. “For me to make this right?”
She said nothing again.
I forced myself not to fill the silence too quickly, then failed.
“I understand now, or at least I’m beginning to. I know why what I did was wrong. I know that I took something from you I had no right to take, and I would never do that to you again. Not for fear, not for love, not for any reason.” I swallowed. “Tell me what it would take.”
Emily folded her arms over the table and looked at me with an expression I still didn’t know how to survive. Too soft for indifference but also too guarded for mercy.
“I don’t think this is the kind of thing I can hand you as a checklist, Pietro.”
“That is inconvenient.”
“Life often is.”
I nodded slowly. “Then tell me something true,” I said.
She considered that for a long while.
“It would take time,” she said at last. “And consistency. And you not running the second life gets hard and calling it sacrifice. It would take me believing that if I say yes to you again, I’m saying yes to a man who will stay in the room with me when things get ugly instead of deciding alone that ugliness means it’s over.”
“I can do that,” I said.
“Maybe,” she replied. “But you saying it is no longer enough.”
I sat with that and, annoyingly, found myself thinking of Olivero, of all people, and his infuriatingly good suggestion. Lily. Violet. Two women who had loved men like us and come out the other side stronger, still laughing in sunlit rooms, still looking at their husbands adoringly, as if survival together had deepened rather than cheapened the love.
Emily deserved to see that.
Not as proof that she had to choose me.
As proof that choosing a man like me did not automatically end in ruin.
I looked back at her. “What are you doing for New Year’s Eve?”
Suspicion crossed her face at once. “Why?”
“Answer first.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What do you think party animals like me do on New Year’s Eve? I’ll watch television in sweatpants and probably fall asleep with leftover chips on my face.”
