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And if the look on his face was any guide as he huffed around his little domain, an unhappy one to boot.
Once again Pascal felt as if the ground had been snatched out from beneath his feet, there where he stood in the narrow road as the darkness fell around him and the winter night grew colder.
For the first time—maybe ever, if he was honest—he had to ask himself why he had expended so much energy to build an entire lifeatthis sad, tired, mean creature. The life he saw through the windows was so narrow. So small.
And exactly where you’re headed,a voice inside him that sounded a lot like hers warned him.
Because all Pascal had done in all this time was make himself small, too.
And it was as if something vast opened up inside him then.
Cecilia.
She was endless. She had walked into his life and nothing had been the same. First, she had brought him to life. Then she had given him the tools to build an empire worthy of her, though it had cost her. And when he’d finally returned to her, haunted by her after all those years, she’d given him a son.
And today she’d told him she loved him, when no one else had ever tried.
She was more than beauty and she was deeper than truth. She was faith. She was hope.
But he’d let her walk away. And he’d come here instead, to watch an old man who had been given the whole of Pascal’s lifetime to right a wrong, change his ways, offer a hand across a great divide…and hadn’t.
Pascal felt twisted up with the things he didn’t know today, but of one thing he was utterly sure. Whatever became of him, he did not want to end up like his father.
All he had to do was open up this death grip of his, let the old man go, and choose. Not to be so small. Not to consign himself to the very same fate. Not to chase the same end the way he’d been doing all this time.
Because Pascal had a child, too.
And Dante was his chance to remake the world. Not to narrow it, choke it with hate, make it hurt and fight and plot revenge.
Dante was his chance to do the opposite. Instead of being the monster his father had been and ever would be, Pascal could be the father he had always wished he’d had.
There was only one way out of the dark and into the light.
All Pascal had to do was finally be man enough to take it.
He turned his back on the house. The man. The father so undeserving of that title. He began to walk, putting distance between him and the street where his mother had wailed to no avail. And as he moved, the dirt from that street that had been on him his whole life fell away, because it had never been his. It belonged where he’d found it.
And as he broke into a run, he knew without a shred of doubt that he would never return.
Pascal ran through the streets of his beloved city. The colors and the sounds, the stories and the songs, all began to blend. All thepiazzasdone up for Christmas, all the people in throngs and gathered in the cafés.
All of them out here in the December dark to bask, together, in the light they made to beat it back.
Hope. Faith.
Pascal finally understood.
He only hoped he wasn’t too late.
When he made it to his home at last, he threw himself in through the door, staggering into his foyer. At first he hardly recognized the space, until he realized what she’d done. She’d brought it inside from the streets—the trees all lit up, the chaotic joy of it all. Evergreen trees made bright like a taunt—
Was this what she’d left him to remember her by?
Pascal was sure that she had gone already. That she had ordered the staff to decorate and had packed up Dante, then taken herself off, just as he’d told her to do. Because when he had been offered the choice to stay or leave, he’d left. Six years ago he’d simply left her.
Why shouldn’t she do the same?
He shouted for his housekeeper, then shouted for his car—
