AllFreeNovel
Share Us
What he lacked in visible emotion she more than made up for. “Everything’s changed, Max. When I thought this was just a sensible, contractual agreement, I honestly believed I could do it.”
“So?”
“So I’m in love with you,” she reminded him, the words digging beneath his skin now. “And a pretend marriage, a pretend family, will never work. You have to let me go.”
Silence. It wrapped around her now, tight and strangulating. “Our child deserves for us to try. We can become friends, Alessia. We can make this work.”
Even as he said the words he knew she wouldn’t agree.
“You don’t get it. I don’t want that. I thought – I thought this convenient arrangement was worth a try, for our daughter’s sake, but it’s not. It’s better for her to see us separated than to grow up in the cradle of misery.”
“The cradle of misery?” He repeated, shaking his head, swearing in his own tongue. “I can make you very, very happy…”
“Can you?” She shook her head, denying that. “You look at life as though it’s an equation – if you give me expensive clothes and jewels and take me to bed whenever you think I feel like it, then I will have enough? I don’t want that. I want a connection with someone. I want to feel as though the person I’m married to can’t go a day without holding me in his arms. As though he can barely work for thinking of me. I want to be the reason someone smiles out of nowhere, the person who can fix anything for someone. I want more than to be a bought bride – sold into marriage by my father, taken on by you because of loyalty to him.”
“This isn’t that.” The words held a warning – but of what?
“Not this time,” she said on a small sigh. “But really, that’s just semantics. You’ve married me for our daughter now, not my father, but it has as little do with me as the first time around.”
Her eyes flashed with pain, and she looked away from him, her throat moving as she swallowed.
“My mother left everyone she knew, everything she knew, when she met my dad. They fell in love and she gave up her life in the States to come to Italy and be with him. Their love was immense and beautiful.”
His silence showed agreement.
“I think about mom often. About what she’d say, how proud she would have been on the day I graduated, or when I saved someone’s life for the first time, delivered someone’s baby for the first time; I imagined the smile she’d have for me, the way she’d hug me and make me feel as though I could do anything. And now I imagine what she’d say about this and you and I can’t believe I ever agreed to go along with it.”
“What do you think she’d say?”
That was simple. “She’d tell me I deserved better.”
Max’s eyes swept shut, his stomach feeling as though he’d been punched, hard. When he opened his eyes and fixed Alessia with a cool gaze, it was born of resignation. “And she’d be right.”
She’d never really moved in. He hadn’t realised that until she’d left, but now, her absence was glaring.
The first time, during their first marriage, she’d brought things with her. Photographs of her and her parents, with her mom at the beach one summer, knick knacks like an apron and a heap of fiction books, a New York Yankees cap that had been her mother’s, and over time, she’d begun to buy things – blankets, cushions, candlestick holders, little items that had been dispersed over the house when she’d lived there.
When she’d left the first time, she hadn’t packed any of those things up, so Max had packed them away, neatly, calmly, shifting them into a box labelled ‘Alessia’. He told himself it was just a part of his life – a box like the school assessments Yaya had kept and clearly labelled, or the trophies he’d won as a school child which were still
packed away somewhere. He told himself he’d send them to her, or give them to her when she asked for them – but she hadn’t, and so the box was still somewhere up in his attic.
There was nothing in his house now. True, they’d only been married a matter of months, but there was nothing to show for that now.
She’d lived here, but she’d never really settled. Had she known this marriage might not last? Had she always intended to keep one foot out the door?
It made sense. It was why she’d kept to the spare room. Why she’d tried to keep him at arm’s length.
What didn’t make sense was the gaping hole inside of him, filling him with the sense that everything was wrong. He felt angry – but with no one but himself.
You have to let me go.
He’d let her go. He’d let their child go. He moved to the attic without realising it, as though his legs were being pulled there on autopilot.
Boxes were lined up neatly, including the one with the Christmas decorations, making him feel as though arrows were firing hard through his chest, for no reason he could think of. He scanned the writing on the boxes until he saw the one he was looking for.
Alessia.
He pulled it down carefully, his expression grim as he looked at the tape and ran his hand along it. He’d been so angry the day he’d sealed it – angry at her betrayal, her lack of loyalty, angry that she’d acted as she had.
