Chapter Twelve
WHEN THEY LEFT the bathroom, it was still dark outside. Domenico knew it wouldn’t be long until the sun began to rise. They needed to sleep.
But when he lay down and spooned himself to Marnie, sleep still felt very far away.
He could not get her story out of his mind. It filled every crevice of his brain.
He’d long ago intuited that her childhood had been far from the idyllic one he’d enjoyed, but he’d never imagined it was that far removed. Left and possibly forgotten by her father, invisible to her alcoholic mother, Marnie had essentially raised herself.
Knowing from the way she was breathing that she was still awake too, he said, ‘Were you still at school when your mother died?’
‘Only just. She died a month before my first A-level exam. I’d turned eighteen a few months before that.’
An answer that made him feel sick to the pit of his stomach. ‘How were you able to get such good grades?’ Good? Curiosity had driven him to read Marnie’s file years ago. She’d earned straight As.
‘Studying was my escapism.’ She wriggled out of his hold and rolled onto her back.
Through the dawn starting to filter through the drapes, he could see her eyes were open, her gaze fixed on the ceiling.
‘My grades were the one thing that was entirely in my hands. I wasn’t even thinking about them for my future, just for the now, because I always assumed my future would be me taking care of Mum.
When she died…’ Her slender throat moved as she swallowed.
‘I always knew she’d die early, but when it happened…
It was devastating. She was a terrible mother, but she was my mother, and I loved her, and suddenly she was gone, and I was all alone in the world, and that was terrifying, so I did what I’ve always done and concentrated on what I could control, which was my exams. I also had to deal with my mother’s estate, which wasn’t easy, but it gave me something else to focus on, and it turned out I was good at it. ’
She turned her head to him and gave a small smile.
‘It was dealing with Mum’s probate that made me think of a career in law.
It was the first time I’d ever thought of a career for myself.
I’d planned to get a job waitressing or something like it, just to pay the bills, but I started searching for jobs in law firms that only required A levels, and found the advert for a receptionist at Cannavaro Law International.
I applied the day I took my final exam, and the rest is history. ’
The sickness in Domenico’s stomach had spread; risen all the way up his throat. He had to clear it to hoarsely say, ‘That was a lucky day for Cannavaro Law.’
‘It was a lucky day for me.’ She twisted onto her side and nuzzled her face close to his.
‘You have no idea what your praise and belief in me meant to me. The way you took me under your wing…’ She palmed his cheek.
‘I was desperately lonely and ripe for falling in love, and there you were, this powerful, successful, drop-dead gorgeous man who saw something in me that no one else had seen before…’ Her shoulders rose and fell in a sigh.
‘I made you my life. If you’d told me to throw myself in front of a train for you, I would have done it without question.
’ She sighed again, her chin wobbling. ‘And then you asked me to marry you.’ She swallowed, then whispered, ‘It took a long, long time for me to accept that the marriage you wanted was nothing like the marriage I’d dreamed of for us…
’ She smiled tremulously. ‘I dreamed of you proposing to me every night from the day I met you.’
The image of Marnie as she’d been as a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old flashed in his mind. She’d been so young.
He’d become aware of her crush as the years had passed, much in the same way he was aware of the weather. It just was. A fact of life that didn’t merit talking about. He’d had no idea it had set root that early.
‘Instead of telling you how unhappy I was, I retreated further into my shell, just like I did when I was a little girl,’ she continued quietly.
‘When my parents’ arguments escalated and I became frightened, I would hide in my wardrobe with my hands over my ears.
I guess my childish reasoning was that if I couldn’t see or hear them, it wasn’t happening, and that’s what I did with you.
I never learned how to manage confrontation. ’
Blood pounded in Domenico’s ears as he envisaged the little girl in the photo hiding in a dark wardrobe, covering her ears tightly and blocking out the world. ‘You were scared of me?’
‘Never.’ She rubbed her thumb over his jawline and gave another tremulous smile that turned into a wide yawn. ‘It’s just how I’d learned to cope with bad stuff. Hide and pretend and hope it goes away.’
Shuddering a breath out of his tight lungs, he pulled her into his arms so her head was on his chest, and held her tightly.
The soft warmth of her skin on his gave the comfort he craved, but did little to dispel the nausea raging through him.
After the longest time had passed, he quietly said, ‘When you said in the rose garden that you’d wanted rescuing from your life… I think I understand now what you meant.’
‘It was the loneliness that was the worst.’ Exhaustion now made her voice barely audible.
‘Working for you made me stronger and happier and more confident in myself, but then I’d go home and feel like a lost little girl again.
I learned to cope and find ways through it, but sometimes…
’ Her voice tailed off, but he already knew what she would have said.
That sometimes her loneliness had been more than she could bear.
He could hardly bring himself to ask. ‘Were you very lonely in our marriage?’
She took such a long time to answer that he thought she’d fallen asleep. When she did finally answer, he wished she had. Sleepiness etched into every syllable, she whispered, ‘It’s the loneliest I’ve ever been. When I married you, I lost you.’
After a few hours of sleep coming only in snatches, Domenico gave up.
Marnie was sleeping peacefully, nestled beside him, an arm slung over his waist. When he carefully moved it off him, she rolled over and burrowed deeper beneath the sheets.
She was in the exact same position when he’d finished showering and dressing.
His heart the heaviest he’d ever known it, he pressed a kiss to her temple and slipped downstairs.
Stomach too tight for food, he asked for black coffee to be served in his home office. There, he settled at his desk, turned his computer on, and began searching. He knew exactly where to start his search, but it took three cups of strong coffee before he knew it was time to stop.
He’d hoped to find evidence that Marnie’s father had died.
Hoped he’d be able to tell her that when he’d walked out on her mother, he hadn’t walked out on Marnie too, that he’d met an unfortunate accident with a bus or suffered an aneurysm.
Anything would have been preferable to the truth that her father was alive and living only half a mile from the flat he’d abandoned her in.
Scraping his fingers through his hair, Domenico drew in a ragged breath.
Marnie’s father had abandoned her. She’d been right not to want to track him down. Peter Ware was now as great an alcoholic as the woman who’d born his only child. How he was still alive was one of life’s great mysteries.
Another of life’s great mysteries was how the hell those two selfish degenerates had produced a child like Marnie. The biggest mystery of all was how the hell Marnie hadn’t turned out like them. She’d defied all the odds. Defied them without any help. Taken her life into her own hands.
The strength and fortitude it must have taken for her to do that. And all without any bitterness at the hand life had dealt her. Quiet anger towards her father for his abandonment, quiet sadness and attempted understanding for everything else she’d gone through.
Dio, if that had been him, he’d have wreaked vengeance on everyone and laid a trail of fire in his wake.
But vengeance wasn’t Marnie’s way. Not against her father for abandoning her, not against her alcoholic mother who’d abandoned her in a different way, and not against her husband for being so monstrously selfish he made her parents seem like amateurs in the selfish leagues.
Domenico had treated her worse than anyone.
No wonder she hadn’t wanted to come back to him.
Dio, how could she even look him in the eye without wanting to stab a knife into his heart?
Rubbing his eyes, he swallowed in an effort to keep down the coffee he’d drunk.
But even the guilt-nausea ravaging him made him think of Marnie and how she’d taken her sickness—severe sickness—so stoically.
Not a single word of complaint of the new hand life had dealt her.
Probably because she’d learned at a young age to take care of herself during sickness, just as she’d had to take care of herself in every other way.
It was the only time Domenico had stepped up to the mark and taken care of her the way she deserved, and even then it had primarily been because she was carrying his child.
She’d dreamed of a fairy tale. He’d given her a nightmare and expected her to be grateful for it.
He’d not even had the decency to give her a fairy-tale wedding, and as he thought this, he closed his eyes, remembering the photos of their ‘big day’ his brother-in-law had taken.
Domenico hadn’t even bothered to hire a professional photographer for it, and when Gio had emailed the photos to him, he’d flicked through them only cursorily.
He hadn’t wanted to see what they showed.
Taking a deep breath, he searched on his desktop for the folder and opened it.