He should have realized at a glance that it wasn’t her laptop that was gone. She was.
Because he recognized the document in the file folder. It was the stack of divorce papers he’d left for her in his hotel room on Maui.
A dark, terrible thing was unfurling in him, deep and wide and thick, but he made himself flip through the papers to see if she’d signed it. She had. Of course she had. Her signature was just as he recalled it, somehow perfectly French and perfectly her at once, and he thought a bullet to the chest might have been easier. Better, maybe.
He heard a sound at the door and he looked up, somehow unsurprised to see her standing there, dressed head to toe in what he knew, now, were her lawyer clothes. Cool and gorgeous and sleek.
Her armor.
He didn’t beat around the bush. “Why?”
Something moved over her face, too quick for him to categorize it.
“You don’t trust me,” she said simply. “You’ll never trust me.”
“This can’t possibly—”
“Dario.”
He stopped, though he thought it might have broken something inside him. He didn’t know how there could be anything left to break.
“I can’t live like that,” Anais told him, that same raw thing he’d seen in her gaze last night there again, and in her voice besides. “I grew up in a house of hatred and contempt. Terrible accusations were thrown about like they were nothing. I won’t raise my son that way, surrounded by suspicion and fury at every turn.”
Dario was reeling. Unmoored and untethered, and he remembered this feeling all too well from six years ago. The sick thud in his stomach. The noise in his head.
The great black pit of loss that yawned open beneath him and wanted to swallow him whole.
Last time, he’d let it. He’d jumped right in. He’d stayed there for years and called it realism. He couldn’t bear the thought of sinking into it again. He couldn’t imagine there was any way out a second time.
“And last night? What the hell was that?”
“I wanted to say goodbye,” she said, and her cool tone slipped a bit. He heard the rawness. The pain. And it didn’t make him feel any kind of triumph. It was no victory. It only made him hurt. “I didn’t want to walk out on you.”
The way he had, without a second thought or a backward glance. She didn’t say that. She didn’t have to say it.
Dario rose then. He didn’t know what he meant to do. If anything.
“Don’t do this.” He wanted to sound fierce, sure. Instead, he sounded broken. Maybe, this time, he really was. Or maybe that was the point she was making—that he had been all along. “Don’t. What do I have to do to keep you here? Name it.”
But Anais’s expression didn’t change. If anything, she looked sadder and more resolute at the same time. And he had the strangest sense of foreboding as she opened her mouth.
“Talk to your brother,” she said softly. “That’s what you have to do for me to stay.”
“No.” He gritted the word out, every part of him tense and furious and still reeling closer and closer to that great black pit. “Why would you ask such a thing? Did my grandfather put you up to this?”
And he saw the way her face crumpled, just slightly, before she blinked it away. He saw the way she clenched her hands into fists at her sides. He saw that terrible sadness in her eyes.
“The fact that you don’t know is why I’m leaving.” She waved a hand, taking in the room, the city, maybe. Him. “This only works if we pretend the past never happened. If you make an effort to act as if it never happened.”
He didn’t understand this at all. “I’d think that’s a good thing, considering.”
“Dare.” That nickname only she had ever used, but in that hard, hurt voice, and it was worse than a kick to the gut. “I won’t live my life as a hostage to a history that you’ve been getting wrong for six years. How can we ever move forward if you can’t look at the past and see the truth?”
“This has nothing to do with that.”
“There is no this without that,” she corrected him. “Because that never happened. I don’t need your forgiveness and I refuse to spend my life trying to convince you to trust me when I never broke your trust in the first place. You know what my parents were like. The screaming fights, the ugly names, the endless horror of it. I won’t raise Damian like that. I don’t want him to think that kind of war is love.”
“It’s not like that. We’re not like that.”
“You can’t even imagine calling your brother. Your twin. You can’t imagine it.”
“Dante has nothing to do with us!” he thundered at her.
“I know,” she said sadly. “And he never did. But I don’t think I’m the one you need to hear that from. And I can’t waste my life hoping you see the light and repair what you broke so we can all move forward. I won’t.”
She was really going to do this. She was really going to leave him, after everything. After they’d made it through what should have been the darkest place. He could see it on her face, in the gleam of moisture in her eyes.
He could feel it in that terrible constriction in his chest.
“Anais...”
“I’m taking Damian back to Maui,” she told him, straightening in the doorway, her tone measured. As if she’d been planning out what she would say and was delivering the news to him as calmly as she could. “I’m not taking him away from you and I won’t keep him from you. You can see him whenever you like. I’m happy to talk about a formal custody arrangement as we work through the divorce, but informally, I’m perfectly fine with whatever works for you.”
“Those are the same papers as before,” he said, unable to process this. Unable to understand. “The ones that claim you were unfaithful and name Dante as your lover.”
“If that’s what you need me to say in open court, then I’ll say it,” she told him.
And Dario understood that he should have viewed that quiet statement as his most decisive victory yet. But all he could seem to feel was a crushing sense of defeat. Of incalculable loss. Of nothing but grief, rolling on in all directions, forever.
She merely shrugged, and somehow that made it worse. “This needs to end, for all our sakes. I don’t care if it takes a lie to do that, as long as it’s over.”
“Anais. Damn it. This is...”
“Dario.” Her voice was hard then. Cold. Very serious. She waited until he met her gaze, and he knew then. He was already in that dark pit. He’d never climbed out. He never would. “You have to let me go.”
IT TOOK DARIO less than a day to determine that he was not going to repeat the mistakes of the past. He refused to throw himself into that darkness and hope his work might save him. Not this time.
By the end of the day she left him, taking Damian with her, Dario was fully resolved. He stood on the roof deck without her, staring off into the hectic muddle of the city he hardly saw without her in it, and knew exactly what he wanted.
And Anais had named the single obstacle standing in his way.
Of