Chapter Twenty-Two What Jealousy Reveals
It followed them for several days afterward — not a fight, exactly, but a low, persistent tension that neither of them fully addressed, until Elena found Dante in his study late one evening, the forwarded letter from Thomas sitting, unopened by him, on the corner of his desk.
"You didn't read it," she observed, settling into the chair across from him.
"I decided I didn't have the right to." He looked up, something rueful and unguarded in his expression.
"I've spent the last few days behaving exactly like the kind of possessive, insecure man I promised myself I'd never become — the kind my father was, actually, now that I think about it clearly.
He didn't trust my mother, either. He read her letters.
He questioned her friendships. I watched it slowly strangle whatever affection they might have had, and I swore, as a boy, that I would never become that kind of husband.
" His jaw tightened. "And then a single letter arrived from a perfectly harmless man, and I found myself wanting to do exactly what I despised in him. "
"You didn't do it, though. That's the difference, Dante."
"I wanted to. That frightens me more than I've let on." He turned the letter over in his hands, still unopened. "I don't know how to hold this much feeling without it curdling into something uglier, eventually. Nobody taught me that. My father certainly didn't."
Elena rose, crossed to him, and took the letter gently from his hands, setting it aside entirely.
"Then we'll figure it out together," she said, settling into his lap the way she'd learned to do over these past months, an ease that still occasionally caught her by surprise.
"You don't have to have inherited the instinct for trust from your father.
You're allowed to build it yourself, slowly, the same way you're learning everything else about being an ordinary husband instead of the Don. "
"You make it sound simple."
"It isn't simple. It's just possible." She cupped his jaw, searching his face.
"Jealousy isn't the failure, Dante. Acting on it badly would have been the failure.
You felt something uncomfortable, and instead of controlling me, you controlled yourself, and told me the truth about how hard that was.
That's not your father's instinct. That's an entirely new one, and you built it yourself, in real time, this week. "
Something in his expression cracked open, raw and grateful. "I don't deserve how patient you are with the parts of me still catching up to the man I want to become."
"You don't need to deserve it," she said softly, kissing the corner of his mouth. "You just need to keep choosing it. That's all either of us are doing, every day. Choosing, again, to be better than the versions of love we were taught."
He kissed her then, slow and full of a gratitude that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with the particular relief of being understood, and later, tangled together in the dark, Elena thought that this — the quiet, unglamorous work of learning to trust each other in small, ordinary ways — mattered more than any of the danger they'd already survived together.