Chapter Five #2
Of everything she’d missed about him, his smile had come top.
Being on the receiving end of it was like being hit by a burst of the sun’s rays, and suddenly she was hit with another memory, of waking in his arms that particular morning and finding his eyes crinkled in a way she’d never seen before.
She’d been hit with such a huge dose of his sunlight that she’d had to scramble away from it and turn her back on him before he blinded her again.
Emotions she could barely contain had swirled and bubbled with force enough to choke her, amongst them a deep horror and shame of how she’d behaved before they’d thrown themselves into each other’s arms.
Remembering that loss of control over her emotions had been terrifying.
She’d needed him gone then, and she needed him gone now because she could feel those emotions afresh, not the anger but the bubbling and swirling contained in them; the last remnants of the love she’d held for him for so long refusing to die.
‘I’m sure if you tell yourself that enough times, you’ll come to believe it,’ he said knowingly before she heard his footsteps cross the stone floor away from her.
The door opened and closed, and the footsteps vanished.
When Marnie heard the knock on her door three mornings later, she pretended to be asleep.
Even though it was the main door and not the adjoining door being knocked on, her instinct that it was Domenico was proved right when she heard the tread of his steps and breathed in the fresh scent of his shower gel.
She kept herself perfectly still, just as she’d done the last two mornings, even when she heard him place her breakfast tray on her table.
She could only be grateful he couldn’t hear her heart.
The roar it was making would prove in an instant that she was faking.
As she’d done yesterday and the day before, she counted to one hundred after he closed the door before getting out of bed.
Her breakfast was the usual two slices of toast, an array of condiments to choose from, and a pot of tea.
Sitting on the windowsill, she ate slowly and methodically, knowing not to rush it.
She felt more like her old self than she’d done in months and would not do anything that might encourage the nausea to return.
It was a picture-perfect day out there, and now that Domenico had left for work, she was ready to get out there and breathe the fresh air into her lungs.
After a quick shower, she donned a pair of jeans and a pretty white button-down top. It was the first time in months that she’d dared wear jeans, the material too constricting against her belly to risk it aggravating the nausea, and now she was awed to find they were too tight to do up.
A look profile-on in the mirror proved what her jeans were telling her. She’d developed a little bump, and for the first time in so, so long, she smiled. Properly smiled.
Pressing her hand to it, she was awed all over again to find her skin had tightened, almost like it had shrink-wrapped itself over the baby to protect it, and it hit home to her, truly hit home, that this little bump contained her baby.
That was her baby in there, nestled in the safety of her belly.
Somehow, they’d both got through the worst of her illness.
They were both still there, and she felt an almost overwhelming urge to call Domenico and tell him to come back so he could see it for himself.
He would be as thrilled to see the bump as she was, and before she could stop it, a wave of misery sluiced through the joy to know they would never share the joy of their child together the way their child deserved.
But their child deserved every chance at safety and happiness.
Marnie had lived through the hell of parents who hated each other, and she would never put her child through it.
It had been terrifying when her father walked out and she’d been left alone with her drunken mother, but at least she’d been able to sleep at night without being woken by their screaming rows.
At least she hadn’t needed to hide in her wardrobe anymore.
She might not be able to give her child a two-parent family, but she would love and protect it to her dying breath. Domenico would too. They just couldn’t do it together, and she had to pray that one day he would accept it and stop fighting.
Deciding to keep the jeans on, she left the buttons undone—the way they fit at her hips meant there was no danger of them falling down—and headed down the stone stairs. After grabbing a bottle of water from the kitchen, she slipped out of the villa’s rear.
The villa’s grounds were split into clearly defined areas, and it was to the intricate rose garden that Marnie headed.
Created hundreds of years ago in imitation of the rose gardens beloved of the English royalty, in its centre was a beautiful marble fountain of the goddess Venus rising out of a pearlescent scallop shell.
The wall of the fountain’s basin was a couple of feet high. After removing her sandals, Marnie sat astride it before twisting round to dip her feet in the refreshing water, and tilted her face to the sun.
Eyes closed, she breathed the clean, fragrant air deep into her lungs and imagined the sun’s rays penetrating her flesh, injecting her with its energy, and as she imagined it, she felt it, tiny electric tingles dancing on her skin.
‘I thought I’d find you here.’
So startled was she at the unexpected sound of Domenico’s voice that she lost her balance, would have tipped backwards and crashed onto the gravelled ground if his super-quick reflexes hadn’t seen him whip an arm out to catch her.
‘Steady,’ he murmured, gently righting her. ‘My apologies. I didn’t mean to scare you.’
Her heart pounding at both the shock of his appearance and the shock of his touch, she splayed her hands on the wall either side of her thighs and tried her hardest to catch her breath. ‘I didn’t hear you coming.’
‘That was obvious.’ He sat beside her, but facing the other way. ‘You were lost in your own little world.’ She heard the smile in his voice. ‘It looked a very peaceful world.’
‘It was.’ She swallowed more air into her lungs. ‘Why aren’t you at work?’
‘I’m taking the day off.’
She closed her eyes. ‘Why?’
‘Because I’m not going to get very far in convincing you to come back to me if we don’t spend any time together. This is our fourth day here, and I’ve seen nothing of you, not with me working all day and you refusing to spend time with me in the evenings. We need to talk, Marnie.’
‘I knew it.’ Shaking her head, she gave a bitter laugh. ‘I knew that coming here was you making your first move.’
‘And yet still you came.’
Unable to deny it, she sighed. Marnie had known from the off that Domenico was going to use their time in Rome to start the game again. ‘Is this where you tell me you’ve stolen my passport and plan to keep me locked up until I agree to remarry you?’
He chuckled lightly. ‘It is a tempting thought, fiore mio, but no.’
She squeezed her eyes. ‘It’s way too late to start with endearments, and what does that even mean?’
‘Fiore mio? It translates as my flower. It felt an appropriate endearment, seeing as we’re sitting in a rose garden.’
‘There are no appropriate endearments between us, Dom. That ship has sailed.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘You need to start believing it. I will never come back to you.’
‘You would deprive our child of being raised by two parents in a committed marriage?’
Anger unfurling, she whipped her stare to him. ‘I knew you’d do that too, try to weaponise our child against me, so don’t. We both want what’s best for it, and I know this much—what we had was no marriage.’
She waited for his usual denials and arguments. Waited for him to tell her what an excellent husband he’d been and how she’d had everything money could buy lavished on her. Waited for him to make the usual implications that she was a selfish, unreasonable, ungrateful witch.
After a long moment passed, he expelled a long breath. ‘What if I told you I have given much thought to what you said about my failings as a husband, and that I am prepared to make the changes you want?’
So stunned was Marnie at his words that she wasn’t sure she hadn’t misheard him.
‘Since you told me about the baby, my perspective has changed.’ He shifted slightly, his arm brushing against hers with the movement, but he kept his stare fixed forward.
‘I am still angry at how you left me and angry that you waited for the divorce to be finalised before taking the pregnancy test, but the baby is more important than my anger. I will never accept being a part-time father, and I am prepared to make all the changes you require to bring you back to me and make our marriage work. But it has to come from you, too—in the year we lived together, you never told me you were unhappy. I knew nothing about how you were feeling until the night you left me.’
Taken aback at how he’d so quickly and neatly turned it onto her, Marnie’s mouth dropped open in disbelief.
‘Why didn’t you talk to me?’ he asked into the stunned silence. ‘Why didn’t you tell me how you felt? You walked away without giving me the opportunity to make things better for you.’
Bitterness rose so sharply she could taste it on her tongue. ‘This is so you, Dom,’ she said shakily, turning her stare back to the marble Venus. ‘After all this time, you finally hold your hands up and admit to being a lousy husband and then in the next breath put the blame back on me.’
‘That is not what I’m doing.’ A hint of anger now laced his oh-so-reasonable voice.
‘I’m saying that we have spent all this time blaming each other for the destruction of our marriage when we both need to accept that we each played our part in it.
’ He paused, shifting his weight again, and she imagined him stretching his long legs out in the way she’d seen him do a thousand times.
‘You know,’ he continued, ‘I have spent much of the last eight weeks scheming ways to force you back to me, but I have also thought a lot about a photo I found in your flat when I was collecting your clothes. It’s the photo in your bedroom of you as a little girl.
Do you know, I know nothing of your childhood?
I don’t even know who the woman in the photo with you is.
‘You have been one of the most important people in my life for over seven years, and I don’t know you.
We’ve never talked, Marnie, not about anything that mattered, and I accept responsibility for much of that.
You know I like to keep the personal separate from the professional in the workplace, and then when we married, I had the perfect marriage set out in my mind.
I set the tone to make it what I needed it to be, but I accept now that it is not the marriage you need it to be, and I am willing to make the changes so it’s a marriage you can be happy in, but it can’t just come from me.
We need to know each other better so we can better understand each other, and if you’re unhappy about something, you need to tell me, not hide it. ’
Marnie unscrewed her bottle of water, needing to quench her suddenly bone-dry throat.
Her hand was trembling so hard that she missed her mouth and sloshed water down her chin.
Rubbing the water away, she forced herself to calm down.
Her head was reeling, a hope she tried desperately to contain smashing in her chest.
After a more successful attempt at quenching her thirst, she quietly said, ‘When you say you’re prepared to make the changes I need to be happy…what changes are you thinking of?’
Domenico might have chosen not to bother getting to know her, but she knew him, and she knew how his mind worked. He would have written a mental checklist of the things she was unhappy about and then written the perfect solution beside each one.
‘I’m talking specifically about your unhappiness at feeling like you were only wanted as a baby-making machine and not as a person in your own right—I think I am right in saying everything stems from that.
To mitigate this, I am willing for us to share a bedroom.
When I travel on business, I am willing for you to accompany me whenever you wish.
I have never cheated on you and am willing to promise to continue being faithful.
I will also carve more time in my schedule for you and delegate more at work so we can take proper breaks together, and when we do take those breaks, I will consult with you about where we go. ’
A burst of despairing laughter rose up her throat as the bloom of hope faded. He could have had a clipboard to tick off the solutions.
Marnie gazed into Venus’s marble eyes and, as foolish as she knew it to be, wished she were real. Wished what she represented was real.
‘You make it sound like a business negotiation,’ she said when she could speak without her voice breaking. ‘But what about love, Dom? Where does that fit with your plan to bring me back into your life for good?’