the heart was nothing new, but the pain was. He had lived in numbness for so long, and Alessia had come back into his life.
Then things had started to change. He’d started to want again. Started to feel again. And now he felt like he was torn open, like the healed, scarred-over, nerveless pieces of himself had been scrubbed raw again. Like he was starting over, starting back at the boy he’d been. The one who had been taken into his father’s hands and molded, hard and cruel, into the image the older man had wanted to see.
He felt weak. Vulnerable in a way he could never recall feeling at any point in his life.
Alessia had walked away from him, and he couldn’t blame her. In a way, it comforted him. Because at least she hadn’t simply blithely walked on in her illusion of who she wanted him to be. She had heard his words. And she’d believed them.
He should be completely grateful for that. Should be happy that she knew. That she wasn’t committed to a man who didn’t truly exist.
But he couldn’t be happy. Selfishly, he wanted her back. Wanted the light and heat and smiles. Wanted one person to look at him and see hope.
“Matteo?”
He looked up and saw Alessia standing in the doorway, her dark hair loose around her shoulders.
“Yes?” He pushed into a sitting position.
“I felt like I owed it to you to really think about what you said.”
“And you owed it to you.”
She nodded. “I suppose I did.”
“And what conclusion have you come to?”
“You aren’t the man I thought you were.”
The words hit him with the force of a moving truck. “No. I’m sure in all of your fantasies about me you never once dreamed that I was a killer.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t. I still don’t think you’re that. I don’t think you’re perfect, either, but I don’t think it was ever terribly fair of me to try to make you perfect. You had your own life apart from me. Your own experiences. My mistake was believing that everything began and ended during the times our eyes met over the garden wall. In my mind, when you held me after the attack, you went somewhere hazy, somewhere I couldn’t picture. I didn’t think about what you did after, not really. I didn’t think of the reality of you returning home, covered in blood. I didn’t think about what your father might have said to you. I knew Benito Corretti was a bad man, but for some reason I never imagined how it might have touched you. I only ever pictured you in the context of my world, my dreams and where you fit into them. It was my mistake, not yours.”
“But I wouldn’t have blamed you if you never imagined that. No one did. Not even my family, I’m certain of that.”
“Still, I wasn’t looking at you like you were a real person. And you were right to make me see.”
“Alessia, if you want—”
“Let me finish. I see now. I see you, Matteo, not just the fantasy I created. And I don’t want to walk away. I want to stay with you. I want to make a family with you.”
“You trust me to help raise your child after you found out what I’m capable of?”
“That night of your life can’t live in isolation. It’s connected to the rest of your life, to all of it. To who your father was, the history of what he’d done to other people, to what he’d done to you.”
“He never did anything to me, he just—”
“He forced you to do things you would never have done. He made you violate your conscience, over and over again until it was scarred. He would have turned you into a monster.”
“He did, Alessia. That’s the point. He did.”
She shook her head. “You put a stop to it.”
“I had to,” he said, his voice rough. “I had to because you don’t just walk away from the Correttis. It’s not possible. My father would not have released his hold.”
“I know. I understand.”
“And you absolve me?”
“You don’t need my absolution.”
“But do I have it?” he asked, desperate for it, craving it more than his next breath. She nodded. “If I have yours.”
“For what?”
“For what I did. For not telling you about Alessandro. For agreeing to marry him in the first place. For trapping you in this marriage.”
“You didn’t trap me.”
“You said—”
“Alessia, I have been manipulated into doing things far worse than marrying