Page 77 of Ruined

“And he did?”

I nod slowly. “Bria was angry with him, but she had a paternity test done. He was convinced she was still lying to him. Everything she said, he twisted it somehow. I think he pushed her into seeing someone else—or maybe it was just a friend. I still don’t know who the man was—”

“The man in the pictures.” Amalie swallows hard. “The ones I saw in the attic.”

“Lucio had a private detective following her. Taking the pictures. He lost his temper when he found out. She came home one night while I was gone, and he was drunk and in a rage. They argued, and he hit her—nearly broke her nose. Marcus heard the noise, got away from the nanny, and came down. Lucio was—” It takes me a moment to say it out loud. Even all these years later, it’s still difficult to remember. “Lucio tried to kill Marcus. His son. He had a gun—and somehow, Bria got it away from him. She swore she didn’t mean to kill Lucio, that the gun went off while she was trying to get it. That might be true, but it might not. I think she wasn’t in the wrong either way, to tell you the truth. Not with her son’s life on the line.”

Amalie is looking at me wide-eyed, her expression still distrustful. “I understand if you think I’m making this all up,” I tell her quietly. “I know it’s a lot to take in. I know you might think I’m trying to hide what I did by blaming someone else. But I’ll admit to my wrongs. I—”

“The clothes.” Amalie bites her lip. “I found bloodstained clothes in a room that I think was Bria’s. Or at least had some of her things in it. That was—” she shudders. “Why would you keep those?”

“She kept them. I didn’t know for a long time, not until after she was gone. She hid a lot of things well. As for why I kept them after that—I don’t have a good reason for it. I suppose after she hung onto it, out of guilt—it felt strange to go against her wishes and throw them away. I can’t explain it in a way that makes sense. Grief makes people do strange things.”

“You’re trying to tell me you grieved her? You didn’t—”

“I didn’t kill her.” It sounds so preposterous coming out of my mouth, even now, but I know I have to take Amalie’s fears seriously if I want to have even a chance of her believing the truth. “My family wanted to cover it all up—what happened to Lucio, Bria’s part in his death, everything. It was made to look like an accident, and they convinced me to marry her—to ensure that she was taken care of and Marcus still had some normalcy. They thought the drama of me stepping in to care for my brother’s widow would distract everyone from what had really happened, and they were right.”

“I read her diary.” Amalie blurts it out suddenly, her hands twisting together in her lap. “It was in the same box with the clothes.” She bites her lip, still looking tense and nervous. “I saw what she said about the two of you—about you wanting children, and she—”

“Our marriage was difficult. She didn’t want to sleep with me on our wedding night, and I didn’t push her. She said she didn’t care if I slept with others; she had no expectation that I would be faithful, and I tried that for a while. I didn’t like feeling as if I were cheating on my wife, but I wasn’t willing to be celibate, either. It seemed like a decent arrangement, if not a happy one exactly, until my father started to ask why she wasn’t pregnant again yet.”

“He wanted more heirs.” Amalie’s voice is a whisper, and I can tell that she’s telling the truth. She did read the diary—she must have, to know this much and have drawn the conclusions that she did—and I’m not sure how that makes me feel. It feels like an invasion of Bria’s privacy, who I still feel some protectiveness over…but at the same time, it might make it easier for her to believe me.

“He did,” I confirm quietly. “So Bria went to bed with me, but she was always stiff and cold, and made it feel as if I were forcing her. She wanted to use a doctor instead—to do IVF—and I wish I’d handled it differently. I thought she was being ridiculous. I’d done so much, and she wanted nothing to do with me. We weren’t even friends any longer, the way we’d been before, except in small moments when she broke through how depressed she was. I think she resented Marcus for keeping her trapped in a marriage that she wouldn’t have been in otherwise, and she felt guilty for it. She projected that onto me, accused me of hating her son because he wasn’t really mine, and being desperate to have a child of my own with her. She made me feel like a monster every time we were in bed together.”

“So why not use a doctor the way she asked?” Amalie can’t quite look at me as she says it. I can see her thinking, trying to sort through it all, to decide if she believes me.

“I don’t know,” I admit, my voice tight with regret. “I should have. Iwasresentful, but of her, not her son. I was angry and hurt, and I felt trapped, too. None of that makes up for the mistakes I made, of course. I can’t ever make any of it right. And it’s worse, because I see that I made some of the same mistakes with you, after we were married. That I started to repeat the past. And now—”

“Now, what?” Amalie looks up at me, and I can see the tears glinting in her eyes again. Strangely, it gives me the smallest bit of hope. She doesn’t look as angry, or as afraid. I think she might believe I’m telling the truth. I think, at the very least, that she mightwantto.

“Now, I don’t know if I’ll have a chance to make it right,” I say softly.

Amalie bites her lip, looking away. “Just tell me the rest.”

“I didn’t realize until after we were married that I’d fallen for Bria long before, when we were friends—when she was married to Lucio. I cared for her, and told myself that it wasn’t that kind of love. But after she was mine—I realized that I did feel something for her that was beyond friendship, beyond her being my sister-in-law. I don’t know if I was everin lovewith her—but I was getting there. It could have been that, if she hadn’t pushed me away like she did. What happened—” I stop for a moment, struggling to find the words once again. To help Amalie understand how awful it all was, and how much I regret the part I played in it.

“Marcus got sick. Nothing malicious or strange—a flu that he got a particularly bad case of. Bria lost her mind. She thought she was being punished somehow, that it was her fault for wanting out of the marriage, all kinds of things that made no sense. She overheard a conversation—”

“About heirs,” Amalie finishes quietly. “With your father. It was in the diary.”

I nod. “I was devastated at how sick Marcus was. She just couldn’t see it. The conversation was pragmatism and mollifying my father, nothing more. But Bria saw it as a betrayal, as proof that I didn’t care about Marcus, that I didn’t care about her—only the family line.” I let out a slow breath, feeling tears prick at the back of my eyes, even after all this time. “When he died, we were both devastated. Bria was, of course, inconsolable. She had every right to be. I didn’t realize how bad it was, though. Not until I came home one night to find the bathroom door locked—and her in the tub, dead. She’d tried to slit her wrist—I saw some blood on her sleeve, but I suppose she couldn’t go through with it that way. So she took every pill she could find.”

My voice is flat, emotionless, because if I say it any other way, I know I’ll break down. I still see the vision of her in that bathtub in nightmares sometimes, and I still wonder what I could have done differently. If I could have changed anything at all.

Amalie’s face is a mask of horror. “That’s why you barged into the bathroom that night,” she whispers. “I thought you were just being disrespectful—treating me like you owned me. But you were afraid.”

I nod, trying hard to control my emotions, to finish the story. “All I could think was that I’d made you so unhappy that you were going to do the same. I should have told you that, that night. I should have explained why. I should have explained so many goddamn things to you, Amalie. I’ve made so many mistakes.”

“I would have tried to understand if you did,” she says softly. “It would have helped. I didn’t want things to be this way—”

“I’ve been cold to you. Cruel, sometimes. I see all of that now, looking back.” The words come faster, my voice cracking, almost desperate for her to hear me out, to understand. “I was terrified of falling for you and something happening. That you would hate me, or leave, or be hurt. That I would care about our child and lose them. It was easier to push you away, to accuse you of things that I had no reason to believe, to pretend that I hated you. I thought it would be easier if you hated me, but that made it so much worse.”

“I wondered why you always wanted to know that I wanted you,” Amalie whispers. “I understood, after the diary. After—reading about you and Bria, the way you—” She bites her lip. “I knew I cared, too, because I hated reading about you in bed with someone else. Even if she was your wife then.”

“I hated the idea of you with anyone else in Ibiza,” I admit. “I thought I wanted you to have done something wrong, so we could hate each other. So we could never have any chance of being hurt. But all that happened was we ended up hurting each other anyway. And you thought—” I swallow hard. “I could never have hurt her, Amalie. I could barely stand to touch her when she didn’t want me. Everything has been made so much worse because I wasn’t honest with you.”

She nods without a word, her eyes glistening in the low golden light. “You should have told me,” she whispers. “Now, after all of this—”

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