Chapter Thirteen
DOMENICO WATCHED MARNIE speed-walk out of his office with the sensation that he’d just been hit by a truck.
What the hell had just happened?
He tried to think, but his mind was reeling as he tried to make sense of it all, especially Marnie’s upset at being given the freedom she’d wanted for so long. Why hadn’t she snatched it out of his hands…?
The force of another truck slammed into him.
He’d done it again, he despaired.
In his desperation to make things right, he’d failed to ask what she wanted and taken the choice out of her hands, and as this thought impacted him, another truck smashed into him, this one right in the solar plexus.
How very Domenico to make me fall in love with you again…
He blinked hard and straightened, his thrumming heart now competing with his reeling mind to stop him from thinking straight. That had to be a false memory, surely? How could she possibly have fallen in love with him after everything he’d done to her…?
More memories flowed, jumbled and scattered, all of them Marnie’s chameleon eyes, the only part of her where the truth always shone if you only opened your own eyes to see it.
She’d glided into his office with love shining out of them. Love for him.
Marnie loved him. She loved him, and…
A cold sweat broke out on his back as he replayed their conversation from her perspective; from the perspective of a woman who’d only ever known rejection from those she loved.
Pulling himself to his feet, he set off after her at a run.
Marnie didn’t know where she was walking to, had no destination in mind, knew only that she had to keep walking to keep her heart pumping and her lungs inflating and deflating because if she stopped the tight pain in her chest would engulf them.
She couldn’t fall apart. She mustn’t. She had to think of her baby, but oh God, oh God, the pain.
She’d barely registered passing the maze when she saw the chapel ahead of her.
Marnie had been to church only a handful of times in her life.
Each of those times had been in primary school for the compulsory Christmas Christingle service.
She remembered feeling cold on her skin but warm in her heart in those services.
It had been such a lovely, comforting feeling that she’d taken herself to the last two services after her dad had left and her mum had been in no state to take her.
It was the first time Marnie had forged her signature on a permission slip.
Now, she felt the opposite of how she’d felt in those services, and she picked up speed, suddenly longing to feel a glimmer of that long-ago warmth and comfort.
To her despair, the door was closed.
Frightened at how close she was to screaming her pain, she stumbled to the stone wall behind it and found the wall-high door, mostly hidden by thick foliage from the hedge running the length of the wall.
It was the door that opened into the secret garden.
It was so long since it had last been used that the doorknob was reluctant to turn, but eventually it did, and she had to push against the door with her arm while turning it to get it to open.
Stepping inside, she took a deep breath and cast her stare around, momentarily struck by the jumble of late-blooming flowers and cascades of foliage running wild.
The sweetness she breathed in was soothing enough for her to take more deep breaths as she gazed at what had once been a hidden paradise filled with stone arches, water fountains and snaking pathways.
All that was left were the ruins. Nature had taken control of the man-made order and given beautiful chaos, like something from a fairy tale.
A short walk inside, she found a stone bench. After wiping it with her cardigan’s sleeve, she sat down and closed her eyes.
Maybe it was better to be here amongst the ruins of a fallen paradise than in the chapel.
It felt more fitting. She understood nature better than she did the teachings of the church.
She’d tried very hard to bring nature into her flat, and she suddenly remembered Domenico presenting her with a box of the cherry tomatoes she’d grown after he’d gone to collect her clothes.
He couldn’t have known the care and attention she’d given the little seedlings she’d germinated to turn into healthy, productive plants.
He could have ignored them. Instead, he’d taken the time to pick them for her, and because she’d been too ill to eat them, he’d had his chef preserve them for when she was better.
His face swam before her.
Tears fell down her face.
What a fool she’d been to let him get so close when she knew he still had the power to hurt her, and what a bigger fool to have believed she had the power to control her reactions to it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered tearfully to her baby, rubbing her belly. ‘I did try. I think your daddy did too, but…’
She couldn’t bring herself to tell her baby that its daddy didn’t want to love its mummy.
And that was the worst of it. That she’d finally felt his love. He’d felt her love too, and rejected her for it…
A stray thought suddenly made her blink and straighten, but by the time she’d brushed away the tears with her grubby fingers, it had vanished.
But her heart was pounding, her pulse racing.
What had she been thinking before the stray thought had come into her head? About Domenico rejecting her love, that was it, and the stray thought leapt back at her.
With hot blood zooming between her ears, Marnie thought harder than she’d ever done before, trying to remember every word he’d said and every expression in his eyes before the tears had fallen too hard for her to see them.
He’d offered her custody of their baby. That’s what the stray thought had been. The man who wouldn’t entertain the thought of being a part-time father had put their child’s entire future in her hands, and he’d meant it.
He’d meant it because he loved her.
The very act of letting her go—and letting their baby go—was an act of love. The greatest act of love he could have given her.
She looked again at the beautiful chaos surrounding her and stumbled to her feet.
Wasn’t this what their baby represented?
Domenico had tried to impose man-made order on their marriage, but it had needed the beautiful chaos of emotions—real emotions—to create their baby.
That bitter fury that had driven them both the night they’d conceived their child had come from emotion.
It had come from the desperate unhappiness they’d both been feeling at the loss of the other.
She hurried to the door, a smile breaking out over her face.
He did love her. He did! And he wasn’t the one hiding from it, not this time.
This time it was all Marnie, frightened, lonely Marnie, because over the last few months she’d fallen in love with him for real, not as a fantasy figure in a fairy tale but as a flesh and blood man, and all she knew of real love was rejection.
When he’d said he was giving her freedom, she’d heard that he didn’t want her anymore, because that’s what she’d expected to hear, because that’s what she knew. Rejection.
Domenico hadn’t been rejecting her love; he’d been showing her his.
He loved her!
Almost fizzing with revelation, she put her hand on the doorknob and twisted it…only for it to come off in her hand.
Where the hell was she?
Domenico and his staff had searched every inch of the villa and its grounds. They’d checked the security cameras that covered the whole perimeter of his estate. Nothing. It was like Marnie had vanished into thin air.
She’d been gone for six hours, and the only thing he knew for certain was that she hadn’t left the estate.
So where the hell was she?
Smacking his palm to his forehead, he commanded himself to think. She had to be somewhere. People didn’t just vanish. People like Marnie especially didn’t just vanish. Not his calm, thoughtful wife.
But she’d been so distraught.
Dio, how could she believe he didn’t love her? Didn’t she know by now that he couldn’t live without her? He’d thought letting her go was the best thing for her, the one act of love he could give the woman who’d been through so much, and so much of it at his selfish hands.
A memory floated in his frantic mind of the wine she’d been drinking when he’d arrived at her door the night they conceived their child.
The woman with alcoholic parents who never drank, not even a glass of champagne on their wedding day.
He could not begin to the imagine the depth of her misery for her to have taken that step…
Her misery had been of the same depth as his own, although whether it was because she’d still held residual love for him or because the decree nisi had made the termination of them so final, he didn’t know.
But her beautiful, damaged heart had fallen in love with him again, that much he did know, and she was out there somewhere believing he’d rejected it.
The panic he’d been barely containing set in.
Where was she? Her phone was in the bedroom, and as far as he knew, she had no food or water.
It suddenly came to him. The one place they hadn’t looked. The place she’d mentioned when she’d come so happily into his office. He’d been so full of anguish at what he was about to do that he’d barely heard her.
If you can drag yourself away from your desktop, do you fancy exploring the secret garden with me?
Snatching at the bottle of water he’d been carrying around for when he found her, Domenico headed back into the grounds and ran past the maze at the fastest pace of his life.
Marnie was all cried out. She’d heard the voices calling her name, but they hadn’t got close enough to her to hear her shouts back, not with all the thick foliage surrounding her muffling her voice. That’s what had set the tears off. More frustration than fear.