Page 4 of Broken Trust

For one second I could set her back by the shoulders and say it, and let the candles burn down over the wreck of it. Then I feel myself drive straight past the exit. Her mouth is soft and certain.

So I let the day fall off me and let my body answer her. My body is a better liar than my mouth. I feel the hope go through her like current when I give her the sound she's been starving for, and God forgive me, I give it, because it's easier, and I have never once chosen the hard thing when an easy one stood open.

She walks me to our room, sits me on the edge of the bed, and lifts the slip over her head, and stands there in the low light not hiding a single part of herself, and it undoes me that she still trusts me with that. I let her run the night. That's the mercy I can give her and the cowardice I hide inside the mercy, both at once. She pushes my shirt off my shoulders, flattens her hands on my chest, holds my wrists to the mattress, and there's a relief in it I could weep for, because when she's the one driving I don't have to be present.

And I give her a performance. God help me, I do. I let her have every sound she's been starving for, and I don't let up, because there's one thing I still know about Gia when I know almost nothing else worth knowing anymore. She has never had my stamina, not even at the start, when we were young and couldn't keep our hands off each other. Gia burns bright and then she's gone. So I give it to her long past where I should stop, tender and thorough and hating myself the whole way through, because a part of me has already worked out that the more I give her the deeper she'll sleep, and the deeper she sleeps the easier it is for me to do the unforgivable thing waiting in the other room. I don't even let myself name it while I'm doing it. That's the kind of man I've become. I can love Gia and plan around her in the same breath.

Gia lowers herself against me, chest to chest, spent, and turns her face into my neck, and I let my eyes close and let her have me, and I don't think once about what I'm still wearing there.

After, I gather her in the way she likes, her back to my chest, my mouth at the nape of her neck, and I tell her to sleep, that it was perfect, that she's perfect, in a voice so gentle it should be a crime for me to own it. I hold Gia and feel the pull of the phone on the floor beside the bed, the thing I still have to go and do, the sour relief of a night survived.

I wait her out. Her breathing goes long and slow against my arm, and when I'm sure she's under I ease free of her and stand, and I look down at her, one bare shoulder above the sheet, and I think: she doesn't know. She never has to know. I can keep this one thing from ever touching her.

I take the phone into the bathroom and pull the door to and hold my thumb over the catch so the lock won't snap. Cold tile underfoot. Only the strip of light over the mirror, low and yellow, and I hate the sight of my naked reflection.

I dial before I can find a reason not to.

She answers on the second ring. She's always awake.

“It's the middle of the night,” Mia says.

“I'm ending it.” I stay under the fan and I start to move, because I can't say a thing like this standing still. Three steps to the wall, turn, three back. “For good this time, and I need you to hear me. It's wrong, and it's taking her apart a day at a time, and I'm the one doing it, and I can't walk into my house one more night wearing you on my skin.”

The pause tells me she's choosing which sister to be. She has more than one, and I've met all of them.

“Come here,” she says, soft, almost tender, the way you'd talk someone down off a roof. “You're exhausted and you're guilty. I know this hasn't felt wrong to you, not really, not when it's just us.” A breath. “You don't love her, Dante. You haven't in years, and we both know it. There's nothing in that house to protect. There's no marriage there.”

Somewhere in the last three years my marriage stopped being a marriage and turned into a calendar. Injections timed to the hour. Waiting rooms where my hand went numb in hers. Two rounds, then a third, then the quiet turn to Mia's body when Gia's wouldn't hold anything. I came into that family with empty pockets and a book nobody wanted, and it was their money that bought me the years to sit and write while Gia worked their floors and ran their numbers and carried their name into rooms I was never born to stand in. I married a Rizzo. That's the sentence I've never let out of my mouth, and it may be the truest thing about me.

“I never loved her the way she loves me.” I confess, because Gia has sacrificed so much for me. Maybe that is why I stay out of guilt.

“Then stop fighting me.” Her voice warms and curls around the back of my neck. “Come to us. We're having a baby, Dante.”

“No.” I press my forehead to the window and shut my eyes. “I'm ending this, and you won’t breathe one word of it to her.”

“Fine.” Easy. Far too easy, and it should warn me, and it doesn't. “But you'll be back. You always come back, Dante. And when you're done playing the good husband for a woman you stopped loving years ago, the baby and I will be right where you left us.”

I open my mouth to answer, but then I hear a sound from the bedroom.

Fuck!

“I have to go.” I kill the call, then my heart beat sounds like a drum roll. I take a deep breath, and then open the door. The room is exactly as I left it. Candles are dead. Gia on her side, her back to me, that one shoulder up, her breathing slow and long and even. In, out. In, out. The same as when I slid out from under her.

I don't breathe. I watch the sheet lift and fall over her ribs and count it. Ten. Fifteen. The deep, unbroken sleep of a woman who heard nothing, who lit candles for her husband and fell asleep believing she'd got him back.

“Gia,” I say, barely a sound.

Nothing. Not a flicker. Only the long tide of her breathing, going on and on.

I let the air out of my chest and lean on the door frame, because my legs have stopped being reliable. She didn't hear. I drag a hand down my face and promise the dark that I'll end it clean and carry every ounce of it myself, and she'll never know, not one hour of it.

And I almost believe me.

On the bed, Gia lies perfectly still with her back to me, and as I cuddle her, I decide one thing for sure, I’m not going to break her heart, she has been through enough. No more fooling around with Mia from this day forward.

3

GIA