Chapter Two Goodbyes
She had four days before the wedding, and she spent them, unexpectedly, saying goodbye to a life she hadn't realized she was about to lose entirely.
Her childhood bedroom looked smaller than she remembered it, packing boxes half-filled on the bed she'd slept in since she was six years old.
She found herself lingering over things she hadn't touched in years — a shoebox of concert tickets from nights out with friends she hadn't called since the engagement, a stack of paperbacks with cracked spines, a photograph of herself at seventeen, laughing at something just out of frame, her whole face unguarded in a way she wasn't sure she'd worn since.
"You don't have to take everything," her mother said gently, appearing in the doorway with two cups of tea neither of them would properly finish. "You can visit. This will still be your home, in whatever way that means now."
"Will it?" Elena turned the old photograph over in her hands. "I don't even know what my life is going to look like in a week, Mama. I don't know if I'm allowed to visit, or call my friends, or do any of the ordinary things I used to do without thinking about them."
"Then ask him." Carla sat carefully on the edge of the bed, her eyes tired but steady.
"Elena, I know this isn't the marriage either of us wanted for you.
But for whatever it's worth — the way he looked at you in your father's study wasn't only threat.
There was something else in it too, something I recognized, though I wish I hadn't had to see it delivered in that particular room. "
"You think he actually — that this could actually become something real?"
"I think," her mother said slowly, "that fear and hope often arrive wearing the same face, and it takes time to learn which one you're actually looking at.
" She reached over and squeezed Elena's hand.
"Whatever this becomes, you are stronger than you know, mia cara.
You have always been. I am sorry it took this to prove it to yourself. "
That evening, Elena called the four friends she'd grown up with — Marianne, Josie, the twins Della and Frank who'd known her since primary school — and told them, haltingly, that she was getting married, leaving out every detail that mattered, ashamed of how little of the truth she could actually share.
"You sound weird," Josie said bluntly, over the phone. "Is everything okay? You've barely called in months."
"Everything's fine," Elena lied, staring at the packed boxes around her. "It's just — a lot, all at once. I'll explain properly soon. I promise."
She didn't know, hanging up the phone, whether that promise was one she'd ever actually be allowed to keep. It was the first of many small griefs she hadn't expected — not for Dante himself, not yet, but for the ordinary, unremarkable life she was quietly, irreversibly leaving behind.