“I’m not going to break his heart. I’m not going to break anything.”
But he didn’t believe that even as he said it.
“You swooped in and spirited him away. You’re mysterious and fancy and you haven’t disappointed him yet,” she said.
And she didn’t look fierce any longer; that was the part that punched at him, like a fist to the gut. She looked sad. Terribly sad.
“But you will. He’ll think it’s him, that there’s something he could have done to make you stick around. That’s what children always think.” She shook her head, and looked even sadder, if that was possible. “It would have been kinder to let him keep imagining you as the perfect hero who saves him from bad dreams. Not the real, live man who hates his mother and doesn’t have time for him. That’s a very common, very boring story. I think he’d prefer to keep you magic. Keep you his.”
“Are you talking about him, Anais?” he asked softly. “Or you?”
The way her mouth curved then made him feel scraped raw.
“I gave up on magic a long time ago,” she said in the same tone he’d used. “And you were never mine.”
He should never have said such a thing. He should never have opened that door, because he didn’t like what was behind it. At all.
“I’m not going to do any of those things.” He gritted it out, not sure why he felt so defensive. So...exposed, as if he was the one with the dirty history of letting people down instead of her. “None of that is going to happen.”
And Anais laughed softly then. Still so sadly, as if it had happened already. As if she knew the bleak future before them, no matter what he said.
“Come on, Dare,” she said quietly, piercing him straight through. “You can’t help it. It’s who you are.”
DAMIAN WOKE UP the next morning fully restored, as if he hadn’t had any kind of fever at all.
“He was sick,” Dario said flatly over coffee, while Damian chased his own shadow around the expansive roof deck that surrounded the penthouse’s lowest level. “I felt his forehead myself.”
“Children are mysterious,” Anais replied with a shrug.
And so was everything between the two of them, she couldn’t help thinking. She expected him to throw her out. She’d been expecting it since she’d woken up this morning, curled up with her squirmy child in a narrow twin bed. But Dario merely sat at the outside table where his housekeeper had served breakfast as if he had nothing on his mind at all. He read the stack of tabloids that had been waiting for him, with ancient pictures of the two of them splashed all over the front pages right there in front of her, but aside from directing a particularly blue look at her now and again, he said nothing about them.
So Anais said nothing in reply, and told herself it wasn’t avoidance, exactly. It was strategy. She drank his excellent coffee and she sampled his housekeeper’s miraculously fluffy omelets, and she told herself it didn’t make her weak or compromised that she didn’t try to beat his head in with the serving utensils after what he’d done. Damian was fine, and she was with him again. That was what mattered.
She told herself that was the reason she held her tongue.
When Dario left for work later that morning he asked her where she’d been staying and she braced herself to be tossed out—but he only nodded when she told him the name of the unremarkable hotel in Midtown she’d found at the last minute, then was on his way.
And he wasn’t even there an hour later when a courier arrived at his front door with her bags. Or when the housekeeper very efficiently whisked them away and set Anais up not in a room in the guest wing near Damian, but in the room directly opposite the master suite on the top floor.
She should protest all of this, she knew. She should have taken Damian and raced off the moment Dario had left the house this morning. Or at least she should have demanded that they discuss things now that they were all together instead of hurling insults at each other in a conference room or through the papers. She told herself she’d do so the moment he returned from the office. But the nanny took Damian out to the park and left Anais to her work. She made her usual calls and caught up on all the things she’d let slide since Dario had turned up on the island. And when Dario came home in the evening to the meal the housekeeper had prepared for the three of them, it seemed much easier to simply roll with that.
And then keep rolling, one day into the next.
The less they discussed the serious issues that hung between them like so many shimmering veils—the less they talked about what was happening between them, or the dark past they’d never agree on, or what had led them to end up in this penthouse together with the child they’d made—the easier it was to keep right on rolling.
As if this was their real life. As if this was who they were, this...family unit.
Every night, weather depending, they would eat dinner together out on that roof deck. The three of them, together.
Like a real family, Anais thought every time, and she knew how dangerous that was. She knew that the dream she’d succumbed to that one night in Hawaii was nothing next to this one, and that single night had put only her heart at risk, not Damian’s, too. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself from indulging.
She thought Dario felt it, too—the insistent, beguiling tug of the sweet life that wasn’t theirs.
But it could be, that seductive voice whispered inside of her, night after night. It could be exactly like this...
It was a treacherous landscape to navigate, and every day it got a little bit harder.
Damian loved Dario. Instantly and wholly. That much was clear, and it made Anais feel a little bit bruised inside that he’d had to do without his father all this time. It wasn’t that the life she’d given him hadn’t been good, it was only that this life—this make-believe fairy tale of a shining existence complete with a mother and a father all for him—was that much better.
She’d loved Dario six years ago and she despaired of the fact she loved him still, but she thought she hadn’t really known what love was at all until she’d rushed through that door to find him cradling their sick son in his lap. Or when she’d watched him read Damian a bedtime story, doing all the voices. Or the many times he let Damian beat him at the video games the five-year-old adored and the grown man clearly enjoyed just as much.
Anais had always thought love was about tempestuous romances followed by years of emptiness and loss, recrimination and regret. That was what her parents had taught her, in their sad, angry marriage. It was what she’d learned in her own. She’d only started to understand the complexities of different kinds of love these last few years in Hawaii, with Damian and the steady support of her aunt and uncle.
But watching the man she’d loved since very nearly the moment she’d met him take care of the child they’d made together was like watching a new sun dawn on a brand-new world. She certainly couldn’t rip Damian away from it. She hardly knew how to contain the joy of this thing she’d barely dared to dream inside herself.
She wasn’t sure she managed it at all. She wasn’t sure she tried very hard, come to that. And she knew, deep down, it would be one more thing she paid for in the long run.
One night they’d followed their usual pattern. They’d had a carefree family dinner, one marked by their usual easy conversation that never strayed from their preferred path of light, airy, unobjectionable topics, just like every other night