Chapter 25 Annetta
ANNETTA
Dom wakes me up with a gentle shake of my shoulders. “Let’s go, angel.”
I blink slowly at his shadowy features. “What time is it?”
“Four in the morning. I got coffee for you. Come on.”
I reach out, my fingertips brushing against the fur lining of his coat. “Did you go out?”
The last thing I remember was falling asleep on top of him after we had sex.
He thrusts a pair of jeans into my hands in response.
We’re going out of the penthouse? This can’t be good, but the possibility of going somewhere new has me slipping into my clothes without argument.
Bleary-eyed, I follow Dom as he leads us to the kitchen, presses a warm travel mug of coffee into my hands, and takes us to the parking garage, where the frigid night air snaps my mind into focus.
I have a sneaking suspicion that he went out to hurt Lasso. He might have even killed him. As I start up the SUV, I wait to feel a sense of injustice at what Dom could have done.
Lasso was shitty, but did he deserve to die?
Dom feeds me directions through the nearly empty streets to Lake Shore Drive.
The long highway skirts the city’s edge, bathed in bright light from skyscrapers along one side, and on the other, a yawning view of the vast, dark lake.
The inky depths strum at my awareness as I drive along the scenic route.
Frederico’s open mouth.
Lake water rushing inside.
His look of outrage, and the deep, sure pleasure at what I’d done all flood through me.
I’m not responsible for what Dom may or may not have done, but I won’t fault him if he did it. Sometimes you have to make your own justice in this world.
I’ve figured out where we’re headed well before I see Cousin Red next to the open gates of Graceland Cemetery. Dom nods in his direction as I pull into the entrance and park in the cemetery’s tiny, empty parking lot.
“Come with me.” Dom grabs his coffee, stepping outside with a blast of cold air, and slamming the door behind him.
The only sounds in the empty cabin are faint metallic pops and pings as the car cools. I don’t move from my seat, fixing my gaze on the patch of darkness under the small stone awning for visitors up ahead. Tombstones line the walking path in my peripheral vision just outside the windows.
Whatever relief I felt at getting Maria and Lucia home ices over in this place. Somewhere, Serafina’s body is buried in one of those graves.
I take a deep breath in the stuffy, dead air of the car cabin.
The door swings open next to me.
“You coming?” Dom rumbles.
“No.” I reach for my mug and sip my coffee, wishing I could be as unaffected as I sound.
He chuckles next to me. “Should I carry you out?”
I clench my jaw. “I don’t want you to.”
I don’t care if he’s bigger and stronger than me. He can yank me out of the driver’s seat and march me through the cemetery until I stand at my sister’s frost-covered grave, but he can’t make me do anything I don’t want to. I’ll stand there in the darkness for hours if I have to.
Everyone seems to think Serafina’s soul is there, buried in the dirt, lonely and waiting for visitors, but I already know what I’ll find when I go there.
Nothing. She’s gone. That’s it, and no amount of begging, bargaining, or rage will bring her back. I’m the only person in my world who seems to understand that.
Dom sets his coffee cup on the hood of the SUV with a clink. He lowers himself until the heat of him brushes against my face, and pine and smoke fill the air. “You need to forgive her.”
I snap my head toward him—our faces are inches apart.
His chocolate-colored eyes are too kind in the soft glow of the car’s interior lights.
I wish he’d be angry. For all his protection, all his promises, all of his rage at the other people who’ve hurt me, I want him to be angry for me, just for this, so I don’t have to carry all of it on my own.
“She’s dead. I can’t give forgiveness to a dead person.”
I can’t make myself like everyone else, who insists her spirit is floating around us, invisible and present as oxygen. She’s not here. The emperor isn’t wearing clothes. The house is empty, the lights are off.
“It’s not about her,” Dom murmurs. “It’s about you. You’re not letting yourself process what happened, and you’re getting stuck.”
I glare at the shadowed benches covered by the awning. This is the place where people go to rest after they’ve visited their dead.
“I processed it just fine. My family and I put too much pressure on my sister to be the perfect daughter, and instead of talking to me or any of us, she bottled up all her feelings and turned to drugs and a secret boyfriend for escape. And then she let me get married to Frederico in her place, where I went through hell for three years, while she played Romeo and Juliet with Russell. And in all of our phone calls and my visits home, she lied to me every day, because she didn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth.
I wasn’t important enough for that. I was expendable. ”
“She loved you.”
“Not enough to inconvenience herself. Not more than she loved herself, or Russell.”
Dom straightens, the hood of the car bisecting his neck so that I lose sight of his face.
He sips from his coffee and rests his body against the frame of the car, making it tilt in his direction.
“You remember what I told your sister at the stadium? That I wouldn’t let any harm come to her? You wanna know what she told me?”
I grit my teeth and squeeze my coffee cup. I don’t want to know. I’m sick of picking up the pieces of myself and trying to glue them back together just to get shattered again. I’m not strong enough to keep doing this.
Dom’s steady voice continues from just out of sight.
“She thought she was getting married to Aldo soon, and she knew that meant she had an expiration date hanging over her head, but instead of telling me thanks or asking me to help get her out of her marriage, she got mad. Or, you know, her version of mad, where she starts box breathing.”
I snort despite myself. She was always giving me and Carlo breathing tips, like if we just breathed in a specific timing or blew pretend bubbles in the air, we could inhale and exhale our way to a perfect life.
“She told me if there was anyone to keep out of harm’s way, it was you. She thought she was going to die, and she told me to worry about you instead.”
My hold on my coffee cup loosens. “Why would she say that? I never told her anything about Frederico.”
“Probably because she was paying attention to you. She loved you.”
I scoff bitterly. “Not enough to tell me the truth.”
“Sometimes people feel like they have a good reason for lying.” Dom sets his cup on the hood of the car and bends down to smirk at the side of my face. “Sometimes, even to people they love.”
My breath catches in my throat, and I glance at him. He grins.
I groan and drop my head against the car seat. Tears prick my eyes.
I lied to Dom, didn’t I? I told him I was my sister, and I forced him into a marriage that put his life at risk.
He didn’t ever hold it against me. He trusted me, protected me, loved me.
And this evening, I left the penthouse without telling him—again—because I didn’t trust him to let me go otherwise.
Is Dom’s love so true that he can still give me kindness and affection despite my lying and betrayals? Does he forgive me every time I sin against him? Is that love? Forgiving someone, no matter what they do?
No.
That’s wrong, I know. Some sins are too big to forgive. But Serafina’s?
I blink at the tears in my eyes, blurring everything around me into dark shapes. I thought I finally had a handle on crying, but that seems to be the one guarantee in my life—always more tears in reserve.
Serafina didn’t lie to hurt me. She was just a girl with a broken support system, doing her best to stay afloat.
I don’t need to forgive her. There’s nothing to forgive. She was looking for relief and love, and she didn’t mean to cause any pain.
I know. I just wish I could’ve done more to make her feel less lonely. I wish I could’ve taken some of her hurt.
I take a deep, shuddering breath and whisper my confession. “I want to move forward.”
“Sometimes you can’t move forward without dealing with the past.”
I roll my head along the seat to look at him, a bitter smile playing at the corners of my mouth. “You get that off a fortune cookie?”
His grin is as beautiful as the sun. “Nah. Just made a lot of mistakes over the years.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for one, letting you get married to another man.” He leans closer to me.
My heart thumps in my chest.
He was just a familiar face then. A man I’d shared a single kiss with. I smile, imagining him bursting into my wedding to throw me over his shoulder and ride off into the sunset.
It would’ve been chaos.
It would’ve been amazing.
“Do you ever think about that kiss outside your parents’ house?” he asks in a low voice.
“All the time.”
He huffs a laugh like my answer surprises him. And then—there it is again, that look he’s giving me, the one he’s given me before, like he’s seeing me as stronger, braver, more loving. Like he’s seeing a version of me only he can see.
“I’m sorry for leaving,” I whisper, my heart rate spiking.
“You came back,” he says easily.
He leans in to kiss me.
When his lips press against mine and my body melts into his, I understand.
Forgiveness isn’t love. It’s peace. And it’s not something I give to another person, it’s for me, and maybe for Dom, too, the version of myself that he deserves, the one we both deserve.
Maybe I didn’t know all Serafina’s secrets, but I knew who she was, and I know the love we shared was important and real.
And as I kiss my husband in the empty stillness of the cemetery, I allow myself to let go of some of the pain, and I let myself make room for something new.