AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ITHADBEENa week of feeling like her heart was beating with ground glass inside it, painful and sharp. Minerva was tired of it. Tired of herself. But she was also resolved.
She’d started trying to figure out what she wanted from her life too.
With the help of some of Violet’s business consultants she’d begun feeling out what it would take to start job training for single mothers, with special focus on those recovering from addiction, depression, or any woman trying to escape an abusive relationship.
The KatiBella Foundation was on its way to becoming a reality, and Minerva was happy to know that she could honor her friend’s memory that way.
And that she could honor her daughter, her inspiration for the foundation in the first place.
But she was still...
She missed him. She loved him. She hated that she did.
She felt utterly, thoroughly grown up. She felt old, in fact. She couldn’t believe that just a few months ago she’d come home with Isabella. That only a year ago she’d been in Rome, an innocent university student without a care in the world.
She felt like she had a world of care on her shoulders now.
But she wouldn’t change it.
No.
She was...changed. She was in love. And she loved Isabella. She was heartbroken, but she was stronger somehow even in that brokenness. She couldn’t explain it, but it was true.
Isabella was asleep, and Minerva hadn’t had any luck sleeping at all lately. Instead of even trying, she stole down to the beach and looked out at the waves.
The moon reflected on the water, the sound reverberating around her.
And her heart went tight in her chest.
She missed him.
She wanted to see this with him. To be on the beach with him again. Kiss him again.
She knew what it meant to want someone now. To love them.
She also knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she hadn’t been heartbroken four years ago at her father’s party. She’d been wounded, but not heartbroken.
This didn’t feel like shame. There was pride mixed in with it. It didn’t feel like sadness, because it felt more brittle. More aged. Like it had maybe always been inside her. This sense of what it was like to not have Dante.
She hated him for teaching her this.
But she loved him for teaching her so many other things. Even when he wasn’t here.
She put her hand on her stomach and watched the waves crash into shore, the whitecaps visible even in the darkness. He might have given her more than a broken heart, and she really had no idea what she would do if her period didn’t start in the next couple of days.
“You’ll be okay,” she whispered to herself.
Because she would be. She had become the heroine, over the course of these weeks, these months. And because of that, she knew everything would be all right in the end.
“Min.”
The sound of her name rose up above the waves, and she turned, her heart stalling out completely when she saw him standing there. His face looked haggard in the moonlight. The hollows of his cheeks more pronounced, dark circles under his eyes that spoke of the same lack of sleep she had been experiencing.
“Dante.”
For some reason, as Dante stood there on the beach staring at Minerva he felt more like that boy he’d been at fourteen, holding a gun he didn’t want to use, his hands shaking, than he ever had in the intervening years since.
