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Raffa nodded. “I had heard that. Your brother was similarly furious. De
vastated, too. So many revelations that should have stayed private…”
“It was just conjecture,” she brushed it aside. “How could a journalist know the details she claimed to?”
Apollo remained silent, unable to disclose what he knew of the situation – unable to tell his young wife that the article was, indeed, accurate. That the journalist’s source had been correctly quoted: that the source of the article was Apollo himself. He could tell her none of these things, because his friend had sworn him to secrecy, and even now, even with Chloe as his wife in every sense of the word, he couldn’t break the bonds of trust that he and Apollo had forged years earlier.
“I didn’t.” Chloe continued speaking, unaware of the direction of her husband’s thoughts. “Cry when my father died, I mean.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t know why. I just don’t cry often. I was sad, I think – but because of an imagined future I had lost, rather than any special bond we’d shared. Death is sad – always. An old man who’s lived well and fast and long? It’s hard to see grief in that.”
“Will you feel that way when my own father goes?”
Chloe paled, her face instantly rejecting his words.
“So it is not so natural after all?” he prompted, his point well-made.
“Malik is so dynamic. It’s hard to imagine his body turning to dust and memory.”
“Your father was just as much so.”
“Not to me.” She speared a piece of octopus and ate it without tasting its salty sweetness.
“What was he like to you?”
“Does it matter?”
“Indulge me.”
And for a flash of a second, just an instant wedged in time, she remembered the way they’d indulged one another only an hour earlier. The way he’d stormed into her room and taken her because it had seemed as though he couldn’t live and breathe for a moment longer in a world that didn’t have their bodies intimately intertwined. She wanted more of that; not this. And yet, hadn’t it been Chloe’s insistence that they get to know one another?
She licked her lower lip, and exhaled slowly. “I told you already. He was busy.”
“When he was married. Then he divorced and your mother spent every spare minute with random men. You saw your father when?”
“Once a year, if that. I didn’t see him at all from my eighth birthday to my eleventh.”
Raffa did the math. “The Veronica years?”
She grimaced. “Yes. Of course, I never met that stepmother.”
“I did. You haven’t missed anything special.”
Chloe shrugged. “Diego didn’t want me.” She took a sip of her wine and then met Raffa’s eyes. “It took me a long time to come to terms with that; to accept that he wished I hadn’t been born. It’s somewhat freeing to be able to say that now, without fear, without grief. As a statement of fact, as it is. He didn’t want me.”
Raffa was as still as stone, and just as silent.
“Apollo he wanted. Apollo he loved. Apollo he was proud of. And how I wished he’d felt that for me! I spent years wishing, wanting, trying so hard. Do you know the happiest I’d ever seen him?”
“No?” Raffa asked, though he feared, in fact, he did.
“When I said I’d marry you. For just a moment – barely even a moment, actually, his eyes glowed with something like the indulgence he afforded my brother at all times.” She swallowed. “I’ll never regret this marriage.”
Raffa, across the table, felt his gut shift as though it were being tumbled through stone. “He wanted this marriage for us.”
“I know.”
It didn’t assuage the sense of darkness that was beginning to spin inside of him; a growing feeling of being somehow out of control. “And what did you want?”
She frowned, her beautiful face pulled taut by a need to be strong and smart and right all the time. He understood those compulsions, for he shared them. “I wanted to be happy.”
