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“Yes?” He turned to face her, with the sensation that an axe was about to drop.
“It’s silly. Don’t worry about it.”
“What?” he asked, wanting to get it over with.
“Were they happy? Did they seem happy to you?”
Guilt lashed his spine. “It’s always hard to know, with someone else’s marriage.”
“Yeah,” she nodded, distracted. “I guess you’re right.”
His heart groaned in his chest. “Is there a reason you’re asking?”
She moved towards him, lifting one of the soldier decorations and hooking it over a branch. “Dad always did the lights first,” she said, after a long beat had passed. “Do you have lights?”
“In the box, somewhere,” he frowned.
She moved towards it, leaning over and pulling out a tangled chord. Her fingers moved over it, working at the knots without any success, so he went to her, pulling it from her fingers, his eyes running over her face.
“When my dad was in hospital,” she said, as he began to work out one of the knots in the lights. “He was on a lot of medication.”
“I remember,” he nodded, but it was an understatement. He didn’t just remember. The sight of his friend and mentor as he had been, at the end, was burned into Vitalo’s mind.
“You went to see him in hospital?”
“Several times.”
She blinked. “How strange that I never saw you there.”
“I went at night.” He’d needed to avoid Kat. At the time, he’d wanted nothing more than to comfort her. He’d hated seeing her pain. He’d hated knowing that he could whisk her away from this life, from Andrew, from grief and death and loss. He’d hated knowing how tempted he was.
“Sometimes, he would talk. And it wouldn’t always make a lot of sense. I think sometimes he remembered things but not always as they were.”
“Such as?” Vitalo prompted, but his breath was locked in his chest, and he would have done almost anything to end the conversation.
“One time, when he was pretty out of it, admittedly,” she laughed and shook her head, but it was with an ethereal sadness. “He said something about mom leaving him. He wasn’t talking to me,” she hastened to add. “It was more like he was making a list of what he needed to do. If he survived.” Her voice broke. “He was talking about where we’d live. Sophia and me, and him. He was talking about betrayal. He became agitated. Angry.”
Vitalo had no idea how he managed to stay standing. Inside, his chest was pummeling and his blood was raging and nausea rose inside of him at what Bella was describing.
“It took me a while to work out what he’d meant. I was only young. But he’d been so upset, and the way he’d spoken hadn’t made any sense, so I kept thinking about it, and finally I realized what he’d been saying. Dad thought mom was cheating on him. That she was leaving him. Or maybe he was going to leave her. And if you were friends with them, I wondered if maybe you knew… if it was true… or just his disorientation. A result of the painkillers.”
Vitalo’s chest felt like it had been cleaved in two. He stared at her, and felt her hope and wanted to indulge it. He wanted to give her what she was asking him for. “So far as I know,” he said, the words graveled, “your mother never had an affair.”
Bella’s eyes showed anguish. “But would you have known? Would he have told you?”
“I believe so.” His eyes ran over her face and he smiled, wishing it were as simple as he’d made it sound. “I know your father loved your mother very much.”
“I know he did,” Bella nodded, and slowly, a smile spread over her face. “You have no idea how strange it is to think I’ve been wrong all these years, worrying over something dad probably didn’t even mean to think, let alone say aloud.”
“Did he… say why he thought that?”
“Oh, yeah,” she nodded, then picked up another decoration from the box, holding it in her hand. “Mom had asked for a divorce. Before he got sick. Or so he rambled.” She smiled, dismissing the claim out of hand.
His heart beat faster. Kat had asked for a divorce? Had that been for him? For Vitalo?
“But it must have been a dream. A nightmare, for daddy.”
“Your mother was with him at the end,” Vitalo said. “I saw her grief.”
