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“You think this is what I pictured for my life? Marrying someone out of revenge to get back at my father? You don’t put your hands on me like he did, but you’re no better than him. He hurt me out of spite for my mother and you hurt me out of spite for him.” She huffs and turns back to face the ceiling. “I’m tired of being the one to pay my parents’ debts.”
She makes me feel like the world’s biggest asshole, with good reason, too. I might have gathered a file full of information on her, but it didn’t really tell me the important things. “Calliope, let’s take your father out of the equation for a moment. If it wasn’t for him, I never would have found you.”
“You never would have wanted to,” she adds with a minute shrug of her shoulders.
“That’s not true,” I frown. “I would have wanted to find out, I just didn’t know that it wasyouI was looking for.” I struggle to put together the right words for what I’m feeling. Everything sounds too mushy and romantic and I’m not that guy. “I didn’t know who you were until your father entered the picture. I wanted to hurt him as badly as he hurt me and that’s how I found you. And I know it’s wrong to keep you here, but I don’t want to let you go.”
I reach out to draw my fingers along her forearm. I love touching Calliope because she’s so soft and warm. Touching her feels like coming home after a long day and climbing into bed. It’s comforting. “You’re a beautiful young woman, Calliope. You persevere despite all that life has thrown at you. You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met. I don’t any other woman that would be escorted through the front doors with a gun pointed at her back and not freak out. You’ve adapted to everything I’ve thrown at you and managed to come out stronger on the other side. And I know it must be tiring being so strong, which is why you don’t have to be anymore.”
Slowly she turns her head again. Her gaze is questioning despite the deep V of her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
I curl my fingers around her wrist and bring it toward me. As I stare at her barren ring finger, I know what I have to do. “You’ve spent your entire life fighting to stay afloat. You have been the strong, confident woman that everyone expected you to be even when life threatened to pull you under. But not anymore. I’m going to take care of you, Calliope. I’m going to be your strength from now on.”
I should have said these words from the start, but I wouldn’t have meant them. Hell, I’m surprised that I mean them now. I’ve loved Calliope the way a predator loves their prey, but knowing that my child is growing inside of her changes my feelings completely. “Your father will never touch you again. You’ll never have to see him again if you don’t want to. If what I’m forcing you into having isn’t what you want, I’ll let you go and I’ll make sure you’re never homeless again. You’re carrying my baby, Calliope, and that changes the shift of power in this relationship. You hold all the cards now. Tell me what you want and I’ll make it happen.”
Calliope just stares at me. The seconds turn into minutes and the stretch of silence between us fills the room. I’m starting to wonder if she’s going to make me release her when she says that she wants to work with children.
“What?” I frown.
She is silent again, this time even longer. But I realize it’s because she’s gathering her thoughts. “I don’t want to be a housewife or a stay-at-home mom. I want to work with kids, maybe in a preschool or something. Part-time,” Calliope adds, “because I want to get my teaching degree. Or maybe do something in school counseling. I needed someone who understood what I was going through back in junior high and high school. I think I could be that someone for other kids.”
I’m blown away. I expected her to tell me to release her post-haste. I expected to write her a check for an inconceivable sum just so that she’d let me see my child again one day. I expected her to run from me as quickly as possible. “You want to go to school?”
Calliope nods her head yes. “I want to be the hero I never had until I met you.”
I don’t even know what to say. I open my mouth to speak and then close it real quick, unable to summon the right words.
“What you did was wrong, Raniero, but I think you’re more than capable of spending the rest of your life making up for it.” A hint of a smile appears on her lips and it breathes new life into me.
“I can’t change the past, but I promise you that the future will be everything you ever hoped it would be.” She has made dreams come true that I didn’t even know I had.
I don’t know what Calliope’s happily ever after looks like just yet, but when I find out, I’ll do everything in my power to make it happen.
Maybe I should send Grant Jackson a fruit basket. If it wasn’t for his vendetta against the Valenti family, I wouldn’t have found his daughter.
16
CALLIOPE
Time is relative. The rate at which it passes depends on your frame of reference.
The minutes pass in nausea. The doctor says it generally abates around the end of the first trimester, but for now, I walk around with a sleeve of crackers and suck on popsicles. Someone on a mom forum said the sugar helps combat feeling sick, so now I live off of orange popsicles and saltines.
The days pass in prenatal vitamins. They’re the size of horse pills and I gag when I swallow them. “Come on,” Raniero jokes, “I’ve seen you swallow bigger loads than that.” My cheeks turn bright pink in reference to our first night together. After a few days, I start cutting them in half. A horse pill is easier to swallow when it isn’t whole.
The weeks pass in food comparisons. At five weeks pregnant, my baby is the size of an apple seed. At six weeks, a sweet pea. At seven weeks, a blueberry. At eight weeks, a raspberry. Every time Raniero tells me a different food item, I bury my face in a pillow and weep. I’m not sad about being pregnant anymore, I’m sad I can’t eat.
Everything else just happens to me, like the story of my life that I’m being told for the first time.
Raniero immediately set me up with an obstetrician. We sat in a sterile medical office with the smell of lavender evading our nostrils and tried to pretend that we were normal people, me more so than him. He’d offered to bring someone directly to the house, but I jumped at the chance to get out of the mansion. My first taste of Manhattan in all its glory felt like returning home.
No buildings had been erected in my absence. Construction of the most traveled upon roads continued. Nothing major had happened in the four weeks I’d been locked up like a caged animal. But somehow the trees seemed fuller and the streets seemed busier. It made me feel alive.
But when we reached the Women’s Health Group and a nurse walked me back to my room with a handful of questions, I felt uneasy. I couldn’t remember the exact date of my last menstrual period because the app that tracked that sort of thing was on my phone, which I didn’t have. I couldn’t explain to the doctor that although we were trying to have a baby, I was not married to Raniero nor had we been together for long. He took the reins on that one and defended my discomfort with half-truths. “Her father is the police chief and he doesn’t really like me, so it’s been a very tenuous courtship, at best.”
My father was the police chief. He didn’t like Raniero. Our courtship had been tenuous. But he failed to mention that it was because he kidnapped me from an open house and kept me locked in his mansion acting as his personal sex slave.
“Oh, so you’re the girl they thought went missing,” the doctor said with a sort of half smile. “Until that second week when you started posting pictures on social media, everybody was really concerned.”
