“I wish Dante were here,” Giovanni said, gazing down at the earrings, a faraway look on his face. “He always has appreciated the shiny things in life just a little bit more than you. You always did think you needed to be the serious one.”
Damian chose that moment to stage-whisper his desire to go outside and play, but there was no mistaking the way Dario stiffened at the mention of his twin’s name, no matter Anais’s momentary distraction. Or the way that long-lost laughter disappeared from his blue gaze and the curve in his mouth flattened out into a line, as if both had been figments of her imagination.
“Why would you bring him up?” Dario asked tautly. “Is he here?”
His grandfather looked old then. Every inch of his ninety-eight years.
“I believe he’s out for the day,” he said with obvious reluctance.
“I’m not talking about Dante,” Dario told his grandfather gruffly. “Ever. And we don’t need you meddling, Grandfather. He doesn’t need to know I was here.”
Giovanni eyed him as if he was inclined to argue, but then merely nodded his head weakly before returning his attention to the open box in his lap. He ran a finger over the bright face of one of the earrings. Then he quietly asked Dario about ICE’s much-publicized launch a few weeks back.
While Anais sat frozen on the couch across from them, her heart in a thousand pieces all over the priceless carpet at her feet.
Through the windows she could see her beautiful little boy running in gleeful zigzags on the great lawn, as if the September sun shone for him alone. But here inside this room, an old man was dying after nearly a century on this earth and the man she’d loved for far longer than was wise or healthy was so closed up inside he might as well be dying, too.
Dario was never going to change. He didn’t want to talk about his twin to his own grandfather—or at all—even all these years later.
He was never, ever going to believe her.
He was fine with these make-believe spaces, these in-between times, when they pretended nothing was wrong. Meanwhile, the past festered between them. Where would it come out? It was one thing for Dario to periodically vent his spleen on her. Anais could take it, no matter how unjust it was. But what happened when he said the wrong thing one day and Damian heard it?
Because that would happen. It was inevitable.
And she couldn’t stand by and allow this man to break her son’s heart, simply because he didn’t have it in him to trust her.
It was high time she was honest with herself. Dario had never trusted her in the first place. He couldn’t have, or he’d never have misinterpreted the scene he’d walked in on that terrible day. He’d never have believed the worst of her, no matter what Dante did or didn’t say.
That was the truth she’d been hiding from all this time. Dario had wanted to believe the worst of her. He’d seized the opportunity to leave her and he’d made sure there was absolutely no way she could prevail upon him to reconsider. He’d seen an opportunity to get the hell out of their marriage and he’d taken it.
He’d wanted to leave her then; he’d done it with surgical precision, and he’d had no intention of returning to her. Ever. If she’d never had Damian, she imagined that scene on Mr. Fuginawa’s lanai would have gone very differently. He’d have insulted her, she’d have returned fire and he’d have swanned back off into the ether.
You’ve been lying to yourself for a long, long time, she told herself now, watching Dario laugh with his grandfather in a way she hadn’t seen him laugh with anyone in years. In a way she’d forgotten he’d ever laughed, even with her. Those stories you told the tabloids might as well have been the stories you told yourself all this time. That there was some grand misunderstanding. That left to his own devices, away from his brother, none of this would have happened.
It would have happened. He wanted it to happen. He made it happen.
She sat so still, while everything inside of her spun around too fast and made her worry she might simply fall over with the force of this realization.
And she couldn’t push this or any other truth on him. She couldn’t make him believe her. She couldn’t prove Damian was his and she couldn’t prove she’d loved him and she couldn’t prove there’d never been anyone for her but him, ever. He would have to take that leap of faith on his own; and here, now, in the lovely home where she’d been reminded of the man she’d fallen in love with in the first place, Anais understood that he was never, ever going to do that.
He was never going to trust her, or anyone, no matter what.
And that meant that despite what she felt and had always felt, despite what she still wanted, despite the things her traitorous little heart demanded even as it broke inside her chest, she had to end this.
She had to take Damian and go home.
IT WAS LATE that night when Dario gave up on trying to sleep in the bed he now found far too empty, when he’d never shared it with another soul. He found himself out on the great balcony that surrounded the master suite and the rest of the top floor of the penthouse. The September night was a warm caress against his bare skin, just the faintest hint of the coming fall in it, and he was glad he hadn’t bothered to pull on anything more than a pair of loose black trousers.
Manhattan stretched out in the dark before him, as exultant and bright as it always was, and it echoed deep within him. It played through him like a long, low note of music, altering everything it touched. Knocking apart those careful boxes of his and making him wonder how he’d ever lived in them. How he’d ever managed to survive like that, bound and minimized. For a long while he stood there, simply stood there in the night with the city beneath him, and did nothing at all but breathe.
He sensed her approach in the moment before she appeared there at the rail beside him, her long black hair tumbling over her shoulders as straight and glossy as ever and her lovely arms bare. She wore a tank top and a pair of men’s boxers, the very same uniform she’d worn to sleep in for as long as he’d known her. Dario couldn’t have said why the sight of it tonight swelled inside him like a song.
He only knew he wanted to sing it so loud he woke the neighborhood. The whole city and all the boroughs. The world.
He settled for turning toward her instead, reaching out to trace a faint pattern down one slim, strong arm and taking note of the goose bumps that shivered alive beneath his touch.
“Life is so short,” he said, and he felt her tremble slightly at that beneath his fingers. “Too short, Anais.”
She glanced at him, then away, her gaze on the dark heart of Central Park below them. “I know. I can’t imagine the world without him.”
Dario hadn’t been thinking of his grandfather, or not directly.
“He’s wily,” he said. Because Giovanni always had been. Because he couldn’t conceive of anything getting the better of the old man, even leukemia. “He’s beaten a thousand enemies in his day, and is never quite as fragile as he looks. I wouldn’t count him out yet.”
She smiled. And she didn’t say what she must have been thinking then—what he knew he ought to be thinking himself. What he’d thought explicitly, in fact, even as he’d arrived in Hawaii and had found himself marooned in all that dangerously seductive tropical heat. That Giovanni was ninety-eight years old. That there was a natural order to things. That living too long must sometimes seem as much a curse as a blessing to a man who had once been so active and was now confined