Ricardo
Chapter Thirty Two
The private room is quiet in a different way than the waiting room.
We can still hear sounds like footsteps in the hall, a cart rolling past, the sounds of the hospital moving around us, but it’s more muted. It feels more private.
Someone brought clothes for Julia.
I do not know or care who. I just know she can finally get out of that bloody dress. And I can finally stop looking at it.
Julia stands near the hospital bed, still in the green dress.
Dante’s blood has dried into the silk.
It is almost brown in places. Stiff at her hip, across her lap, along the skirt, where she must have pressed the fabric against him and held on.
Her eyes are swollen from crying. Her face is too pale. Her hair has come loose around her shoulders, no longer arranged for the gala, no longer smooth and shiny.
She looks so painfully young right now.
Too far away from me.
“Julia,” I say gently.
She blinks.
“I need you to change.”
She looks down at herself as if she has forgotten what she is wearing.
Her hand moves to the stain on the dress and stops before she touches it.
“I used it,” she says, voice thin.
“I know.”
“My hands kept slipping.”
“I know.”
Her mouth trembles.
She is still in shock, and the sooner she gets out of this dress, the better it'll be.
I cross the room slowly, making sure she sees every movement. I take the clean clothes and place them on the bed in front of her.
“You will feel better once you're out of it.”
Her eyes lift to mine.
I'm not sure she believes it, but it will be one less horror she has to deal with.
I unzip the dress and then leave her to it, thinking she'll be more comfortable if I give her some space.
But I don't go far. I just step on the other side of the curtain and wait.
Fabric rustles.
Her breath catches a couple of times.
I close my hands into fists at my sides and force myself to stay where I am.
When she calls my name, the dress is bundled in her hands.
Held away from her body.
She looks at it with such grief that for a moment I think she may start apologizing again.
I take it from her before she can find another reason to blame herself.
“Ricardo—”
“I have it.”
Her fingers resist for half a second.
Then she lets go.
I fold the dress over the back of the chair near the wall, stained side turned inward. Then I guide her to the narrow couch beneath the window.
“Sit.”
She does.
I sit beside her, close but not crowding her. My hand settles over hers. Her fingers are cold.
For a few seconds, I say nothing.
There are questions tearing through me.
Harrison.
The roses.
The men in her apartment.
Dante on an operating table.
All of it points in one direction now, but I will not drag her through it like an interrogation. I have done enough of those tonight. This is different.
She is different.
I look at our hands.
“I need to know the whole story with Harrison.”
She swallows and stares at her connected hands.
“I know you may not be ready to trust me with all of it yet,” I say, keeping my voice low. “But—”
“I trust you.”
The words come fast.
I lift my eyes to hers.
She swallows hard.
“That isn’t the problem.” Her voice shakes. “I trust you, Ricardo.”
“Then tell me what the problem is.”
Her eyes fill again.
She opens her mouth and then closes it again.
Then she takes one shaky breath and speaks. “I’m ashamed.”
My chest tightens at her words.
She keeps her eyes down. “I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed that I let it go on so long. That I let him make me smaller and quieter and easier for him to handle. That I knew something was wrong, and I kept finding reasons to stay because leaving felt worse than surviving one more day with it.”
I say nothing.
She needs to say this.
“I’m embarrassed that I let it get to that point,” she whispers.
“What point?” I ask gently.
She sniffles and wipes at her cheek with the heel of her free hand.
“At first, everything was fine,” she says.
“It wasn’t wonderful. It wasn’t some great love story.
But it was fine. He was handsome, educated, polite, from the right family.
He knew the right people. He understood how to move navigate the world my parents cared about.
My mother loved him. My father respected his family. ”
Her mouth twists.
“It was the relationship they wanted for me. And I think, for a long time, it was the relationship I thought I was supposed to want for myself. Picture perfect from the outside.”
I hold her hand a little tighter.
“Inside, it was different.”
She stares at the floor.
“Harrison was a perfect gentleman in the beginning. Too perfect, maybe, but I didn’t know how to see that then. He opened doors. Sent flowers—white roses. Complimented me. Remembered what I liked. Knew how to charm my mother. Knew all the right things to say to my father.”
A tear slips down her cheek.
“He made it easy for everyone to approve of him.”
“And then?” I ask.
She lets out a trembling breath.
“It started slowly. So slowly I didn’t know it was happening right away. He would tell me one friend was jealous of me. Another was vulgar. Another did not understand the life I was going to have. He never demanded I stop seeing them. He only made it unpleasant every time I did.”
Her voice goes monotone in that terrible way people use when they are describing pain.
“If I went to dinner with someone he disliked, he would be cold afterward.
If I missed his call, he would ask who mattered more than he did.
If I laughed too much at someone's joke, he would say I was making myself look desperate for attention. Eventually, it became easier not to go. Easier not to answer. Easier to let the real friendships fade because I was tired of paying for them afterward.”
Dante’s name sits on the tip of her tongue. I can tell.
“The people left around me were the ones he approved of,” she continues. “Society people. Charity board people. Women who smiled perfectly and reported everything. Men who treated Harrison like he had already won an office he hadn’t even run for yet.”
Her hand trembles inside mine.
“And then he started criticizing me.”
Her eyes close.
“Little things at first. My dress was too bright. My laugh too loud. My answer at dinner too opinionated. My hair better up. My lipstick too much. My work with the charities too emotional. My politics too naive. My posture too stiff. My voice too soft. My voice too sharp. It changed depending on what he wanted me to fix that day.”
Every word is a coal dropped into my chest.
She opens her eyes, but she is not looking at me now. She is looking at whatever room she is trapped in inside her mind.
“He made it sound like guidance. Like he was helping me. Like I should be grateful because he saw the things other people were too polite to say. Then, after a while, he stopped making it sound so nice.”
Her lips press together.
“He called me stupid once. At first, I thought I misheard him. Harrison never sounded angry in public. He never lost his temper where anyone important could see. But in private, he started saying exactly what he meant. I was naive. Spoiled. Ungrateful. Cold. Frigid. Too needy. Too stubborn. Too weak. Too difficult.”
I go very still.
Her shame is pouring out of her now, but none of it belongs to her.
Not one ounce.
“He knew exactly which buttons to press,” she says. “And if I cried, he would say I was manipulating him. If I argued, he would say I was proving his point. If I stayed quiet, he would say I was punishing him.”
Her throat works.
“I started making myself into whatever version of me made him least cruel.”
I cannot stop my hand from lifting to her face.
I touch her cheek with the backs of my fingers, light enough that she can pull away if she wishes.
She does not.
“I reached a breaking point,” she says. “I don’t even remember which fight it was.
That’s the awful part. There were so many by then that I can’t remember what finally made me break.
I only remember standing in that perfect house that he picked out for us and realizing I couldn’t marry him.
I couldn’t stand next to him in church or at some country club or wherever our parents imagined it happening and promise my life to a man who made me afraid to breathe wrong. ”
Her voice cracks.
“So I told him I was done.”
She swallows.
“He—” She snaps her mouth shut. Then she tries again. “He hit me.”
Every thought in my head sharpens to a point and aims right at Harrison fucking Winthrop.
Julia’s face crumples, but she keeps talking.
“He slapped me so hard I fell against the side table. I remember the sound more than the pain. Something broke. A glass, I think. Maybe a frame. I was on the floor, and I looked up at him, and he…”
She shakes her head.
“That was the strangest part. For one second, he looked almost gleeful. Then he changed. Just like that, a mask came down. Suddenly, he was all concern. He came down beside me and touched my face, and he was sorry. So sorry. He said he loved me. He said I scared him. He said I knew how important everything was, how much pressure he was under, how hard I made it when I pushed him.”
My blood turns to ice.
“He blamed you.”
She nods, crying now.
“He blamed me. And then he sent white roses.”
My jaw tightens until it hurts.
“White roses,” she repeats. “The next morning. So many of them. In a crystal vase. He always knew how to cover up his cruelty with beauty.”
Her hand grips mine suddenly.
“I knew better,” she says, the words urgent now, as if she needs me to believe this part.
“I knew better than to believe him when he promised he would never do it again. I knew what men like that did. I had thrown charities for domestic violence awareness and sat in meetings while women talked about programs and emergency housing and warning signs. I knew all of it in theory, in my head.”
She presses her free hand against her chest.
“But knowing and being in it are different. I was terrified. I was terrified of him. Of what he would do if I tried to leave again. Of what he could ruin. Of how quickly he could make people believe I was unstable or ungrateful or hysterical.”
My thumb moves over her knuckles.
“I didn’t call my parents,” she says. “I couldn’t. They would have made it about reputation first. Maybe not forever, but first. And I couldn’t survive their first reaction.”
Her eyes lift to mine.
“So I called Dante.”
Her voice breaks on his name.
“He answered right away. I hadn’t spoken to him properly in so long because Harrison hated him. Hated that I had someone who knew me before all of that. Hated that Dante could make me laugh without trying. Hated that I trusted him.”
A tear falls onto our joined hands.
“I told him I needed help. I don’t even think I said much. I think I only said Harrison hit me, and Dante went quiet.”
That sounds like my son.
“I had never heard him that quiet,” she whispers. “He asked where I was. I told him. He said, ‘Stay where you are. Keep your phone on. I’m coming.’ And he did.”
Her shoulders begin to shake.
“He came all the way to Connecticut that day. He got me out of there. He took me back to Chicago. He helped me find the apartment. He helped me choose things for myself again. Curtains. A couch. Coffee mugs. Stupid things that felt impossible because Harrison had made every choice feel like a test I could fail.”
She covers her mouth for a second, fighting for control.
“And now Dante is in the hospital because of me,” she says.
“No.”
She flinches at the force of it.
I take her face in both hands, carefully, but firm enough that she has to keep her eyes on me.
“No, Julia.”
Tears spill over her lashes.
“He was there for me then, and he was there for me tonight, and now—”
“He is in the hospital because of Harrison.”
Her mouth trembles.
I hold her gaze.
“Listen to me. Dante made his choices tonight because he loves you. Because he is brave. Because he is my son. But the bullets came from Harrison. The men came from Harrison. That blood belongs at Harrison’s feet, not yours.”
She shakes her head once, barely.
I do not let go.
“No,” I say again, lower now. “Not yours.”
She breaks.
The sound that comes out of her is like a small wail, as if she is still trying to contain it. Then her shoulders fold inward, and the next sob tears through her whole body.
I pull her into my arms.
She comes to me without resistance, hands fisting in my shirt, face pressed to my chest. She is shaking so hard I can feel it through both of us. I hold the back of her head with one hand and wrap my other arm around her, drawing her in until there is no space left between her and me.
“I’m sorry,” she says into my shirt. “I’m so sorry.”
“No.”
“He came because of me.”
“No.”
“He always comes when I call, and now he—”
Her voice breaks before she can finish.
I close my eyes.
Dante.
My son.
My boy in an operating room with a bullet wound in his abdomen and too much blood left on Julia’s hands. My son, who stood between her and men with guns because that is who he is. Because even hurt, even angry, even cut open by what Julia and I did, he still chose her life before his own.
He may die because of it.
The thought moves through me like a blade dragged slowly across my heart.
I hold Julia tighter, but over her bowed head, my eyes open and lock onto the dress folded over the chair.
The dress soaked in my son's blood. The dress that Julia pressed against his wound to try to keep him alive.
Harrison Winthrop did this.
He put bruises on the woman I love, isolated her, made her doubt herself. Then he sent men into her home and put my son in the hospital.
My hand moves slowly over Julia’s hair because she needs tenderness from me. She needs warmth.
But inside me, something colder than rage grows.
Harrison will pay for Julia’s tears.
He will pay for every white rose he ever sent over the damage he caused.
He will pay for every night she stayed because he terrified her into it.
And he will pay for every drop of blood my son has lost.
I press my mouth to Julia’s hair.
I will pull it out of him myself.