Chapter Twenty-One An Old Name Returns
The letter arrived through entirely ordinary means — forwarded from her parents' address, addressed in handwriting Elena hadn't seen in over a year, and recognized before she'd even opened the envelope.
Thomas.
She and Thomas Ainsley had dated for two quiet, unremarkable years before her father's debts consumed everything, a relationship that had ended not in heartbreak but in the slow, mutual fading of two people who'd simply wanted different things.
She hadn't thought about him in months. She certainly hadn't expected a letter, warm and careful, explaining he'd heard about her sudden marriage through mutual friends and wanted to make sure she was happy — genuinely, sincerely happy, in the way old, gentle affection sometimes lingers long after romance has gone.
She made the mistake of mentioning it to Dante over dinner, entirely without thinking, and watched his expression shift into something cold and unreadable before she'd even finished the sentence.
"He wrote to you."
"It's nothing, Dante. A kind letter from someone I used to know. He's not a threat."
"I didn't say he was a threat." But his jaw had tightened, and the careful stillness that came over him now had nothing to do with business and everything to do with something far more personal. "May I see it?"
"That feels like a strange request."
"It is a strange request." He set down his fork, and for the first time in weeks, Elena watched the old coldness resurface — not directed at her, exactly, but present regardless, simmering just beneath a surface she'd thought had softened permanently.
"I find I don't particularly enjoy imagining another man's handwriting expressing concern for your happiness, Elena.
I'm aware that's not entirely rational."
"It's not rational at all. Thomas and I ended amicably, over a year before I met you. He's happily engaged to someone else, actually, according to the letter. He wrote out of kindness, nothing more."
"I believe you." Dante's voice had gone tight. "That doesn't seem to change how it sits in my chest, regardless."
Elena studied him — this man who had faced down Salvatore Calvetti and loan sharks and men who trafficked in fear for a living, undone entirely by a gentle, well-meaning letter from a man who wasn't even a rival — and felt something complicated stir in her chest: exasperation, yes, but underneath it, an unwilling tenderness at the sheer, uncomplicated humanness of watching him struggle with something as ordinary as jealousy.
"Come here," she said softly, holding out her hand.
He came, reluctantly, and let her draw him down into the chair beside her instead of across the table, an intimacy neither of them had questioned in weeks now the sturdy architecture of their marriage.
"I love you," she said simply. "Not the memory of Thomas Ainsley, not some idealized version of a life I never actually wanted. You. Difficult, controlling, occasionally absurd about old love letters, entirely mine. That isn't going to change because a kind man from my old life wished me well."
Something in his shoulders finally eased. "I know that, logically."
"But?"
"But logic has never been particularly effective against how much I've come to need you.
" He pressed his forehead to her temple, breathing her in.
"I've never been jealous of anything in my life, Elena.
I've never had anything worth being jealous over.
I don't entirely know what to do with the feeling, now that I have it. "