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His pencil holder. Stapler. The lamp. The damn zen garden that was supposed to make him feel calm. A stack of papers. Until his office was littered with the kind of destruction that mirrored the man he was within.
Piece by piece, he exposed himself. Tore away the walls. Tore away the facade until he had to look at it. Until he had to look at himself.
Pain tore at his chest. For once, he didn’t have to strike out to cause physical agony as punishment. It was all in him, burning him alive from the inside out. He dropped to his knees, leaned forward, his forehead and forearms touching the floor.
She was right. He was a liar. He was scared, of himself. But not only of that, of caring and losing again. So much so, he had spent his life training himself never to care, on the excuse that he was protecting everyone from himself.
When he was really protecting himself from everyone else. Still a scared child, hiding behind a sofa, waiting, waiting for the monster to find him. A monster from outside, or a monster inside of himself.
He had believed, wholly, that he had banished his every emotion. But it was a lie, too. He hadn’t. He had simply embraced fear and allowed it to dictate everything he did. Who he was.
For a brief moment in time, he’d had love in this house. A woman who loved him. A child who trusted him completely.
And he had thrown it away. The final punishment for his sins. The ultimate penance. He had fallen in love. The thing he had sworn he must never do. And he had done it. So he had pushed her away, pushed them away.
And now he was reduced to nothing. Raw and bleeding, all of his protection gone. All of his defenses, his ways of dealing, exposed for the flimsy nothings they were. He could do nothing. Nothing but lie there and embrace the pain, the love, the misery, the loss. Not just for Paige, not just for Ana, but for every moment in his life.
The walls he’d built to protect himself burned to nothing, reduced to ash before his eyes. He was not the man he pretended to be. He was not the man the media thought he was. And he let himself hope, for a moment, that he was the man that Paige saw. A man worthy of her love, worthy of Ana’s admiration. Worthy of the Colsons’ adoption.
For a long time he lay there, stripped of his protection. Of everything. Anguish washing over him, beating against him.
Finally, he stood, his hands shaking, and dialed his mother and father’s phone number.
“Dante?” His mother answered on the second ring.
“Why did you adopt me?” he asked. He had never asked. He had always feared the answer. Had always feared that the media was right. And over the years, he had simply started to assume they were.
More than that, he was afraid of loving again. Of caring and losing. But that fear had carried him nowhere. That fear had nothing for him. Had given him nothing.
“Because,” she said, her tone simple, matter-of-fact, “we fell in love with you the moment we saw you. An angry teenage boy with so much potential, in so much need. We knew you were our son. The one we’d been waiting for.”
“I wasn’t ready to hear that,” he said, swallowing hard, holding the phone tight to his ear. “Until now.”
“I know,” she whispered.
He closed his eyes and released his hold on fear. “I love you,” he said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PAIGE felt like she was dying. Ana hadn’t slept the whole night. She couldn’t really blame her. She was in her little bassinet, rather than her crib, and crammed back into Paige’s old room, in her old apartment. As a result, Paige hadn’t slept, either.
She’d thought coming back to her little apartment would give her some clarity. Make her feel more…more like Dante and everything else had never happened. But it hadn’t helped. She was too different. Too changed from her time with him. There was no way to even pretend it hadn’t happened.
Now she was sitting at her desk, after having weathered a sea of congratulations from the other employees on her way into the office, feeling like death and having just spent the night away from her new husband, who was probably never going to speak to her again.
She would have to go back to Dante’s house, she knew that. But one night couldn’t have hurt. No one would find out. It would hardly compromise the adoption. And she needed space. Needed to not be sharing the same air as Dante.
