Isabella #2
A shuddered breath leaves me. “I woke up alone, Elio… I found out my father was dead and you weren’t there.
I found out I was carrying your child alone.
” His face pinches with pain. I keep going because if I stop now, the words will crawl back into me and poison whatever is left of my soul.
“I had already seen exactly what your love was worth when duty came calling. There was no point trying to tell you when I already knew what would happen.”
His throat works. What surprises me most is how he does not defend himself, nor does he try to tell me I don’t understand what it cost him to stay with his family when I left.
The pads of his fingers glide over my skin, catching the tears I am furious to realize have spilled over.
His touch is careful, reverent in a way that feels unfair after everything his hands have done to me. All that they failed to protect.
“I never should have let you go,” he whispers. “I was a coward. A fool. You deserved better, and I am sorry.”
I used to imagine those words in the early months when Matteo was no bigger than a small melon in my belly. I imagined Elio coming back, pretended he would be standing in a doorway when I woke up with his face drawn with regret, telling me he had made a mistake.
I imagined slapping him, kissing him, screaming at him until my voice gave out. In those fantasies, I could refuse him with dignity I never actually possessed outside of those dreams.
Then time passed and Matteo was born.
The fantasies died right alongside my love for him because survival had left very little room for ghosts that do not help or hold a fussy baby at three in the morning.
Now that Elio is here, touching my face and saying the words I thought were too late, I am finding that the girl who waited for them all this time is not dead, after all. She has only been buried under motherhood and rage, but she is still alive enough to weep at hearing them.
Trusting him could be the worst mistake of my life. However, this is no longer just about me anymore.
If it were, perhaps I could run forever.
I could take the old hurt and wear it like armor as I always have and keep it from shattering my heart again and again.
I could tell Elio Conti he is too late, that regret has no currency here and that love which fails at the first sign of struggle does not get to return for a second chance.
But Matteo exists between us.
My son with Elio’s dark hair and my eyes, who watches the east hallway with questions building with no answers to follow. My bright baby boy who deserves truth and also safety, and who may someday ask why I kept him from a father who wanted to try.
What answer will I give him then?
That I was afraid?
That I was right to be?
That both things can be true and still leave a child aching with hurt?
I don’t know anymore.
“I want to stop wanting you,” I whisper.
I look away first, furious with myself for admitting it, and stare past the terrace toward the patrolling guards below. One of them pauses near the far wall, turns, then continues his route with his rifle angled across his chest. The world below remains controlled. Inside me, nothing is.
“It is destroying me too,” Elio admits quietly.
The words pull my gaze back despite myself.
More tears spill down my cheeks before I can stop them. “He is yours, Elio. He has always been.”
For a long moment he doesn’t speak, remaining completely frozen in place while his eyes move between mine. His eyes close briefly as he pulls in a slow breath, and when they open again, they shine with a devastation that has nothing to do with anger.
His voice shakes, just slightly. “In the back of my mind, I had hoped… I think I knew before my mind allowed me to understand.”
Elio pulls me closer, wrapping me in his arms as if he can shield me from the eight years we lost. His body is warm around mine, solid and familiar in a way that makes pain flash inside my chest. My forehead presses against his chest before I can stop myself, and I hate the sob that tries to claw up my throat.
“I knew,” he whispers against my hair. “Christ, Isabella. I knew. But hearing you say it…”
I wrap my arms around him tightly.
He continues, his voice wrecked. “I never touched another woman after you left. No one could compare. No one ever came close. I thought distance would cure me of you, but it didn’t. It only turned wanting you into another form of punishment.”
I close my eyes against him. The words satisfy some wounded, jealous part of me even if it’s useless to feel that way.
Fidelity after abandonment is not a gift that gives back the years we’ve lost. It does not place Elio beside me in the hospital room, or at birthdays and other major life events he’s missed since.
It does not undo mornings when I looked at our son and wondered whether the man who made him would have loved him or not.
But it softens the hurt I’ve been holding onto all this time.
He cups my face again, drawing me back just enough to look at me.
His thumbs brush the tears from my cheeks with a gentleness so at odds with the violence I know he’s capable of that my breath catches in my throat.
“I’m so sorry for walking away and leaving you to raise our son alone, for every second you carried that fear by yourself. I will spend the rest of my life making it right if you let me.”
I pull back just enough to see there is war waging inside him—the parts of him still shackled to the family that raised him and the oaths he has been molded to honor, clashing with the selfish wants and desires he is choosing to cultivate with me.
It’s within that blood-soaked education that he has always been taught that love is weakness and seen firsthand what happens when empires discover it.
His hesitation lasts only a breath, but it is enough for me to see exactly where he still stands.
Elio has everything to lose now and yet he’s choosing this, anyway.
I don’t know who moves first.
Maybe both of us.
One moment, we are standing inches apart and the next, his mouth is on mine.