Chapter Five
CHAPTER FIVE
Ivy struggled with the wave of anger that snapped at her heart. Praying for patience, she asked, ‘You really don’t remember?’
But his blank look only hurt more.
She tried not to be devastated by the fact that one of the worst days of her life wasn’t even a memory for him.
She tried to focus on the fact that she had survived, both the accident and the realisation of just how unimportant she was to a man who had married her in name only. It wasn’t his fault. But it still hurt.
‘Three years ago, I was crossing a road when I was hit by a cyclist. I was knocked unconscious for a short time and taken to hospital,’ she said, trying to ignore the way he’d tensed in his seat.
‘When I came round, the nurse told me that they’d tried to call you because you’re listed as my next of kin,’ she explained, fighting the memory of how hopeful she’d been when she’d heard that.
Of how terrified she’d been in that hospital, bruised and battered, her sight so damaged, and just how desperately she’d wanted someone to be there with her.
‘I came round before you could call back,’ she said, pressing on.
A muscle flexed in his jaw, but his gaze remained unreadable.
‘So I called you myself,’ she confessed, looking at her hands.
She’d called him and she’d so very nearly asked, begged and pleaded for him to come. If he could. Just for a short while. Just so she wasn’t alone.
‘I got your secretary and…’
She’d been such a fool. She should have known better. He hadn’t promised to be there for her, he hadn’t ever pretended to be a real husband. So no, it was not Antonio’s fault that she had imagined that he might be even remotely concerned about her.
After what she’d heard him say, she’d realised that she had to stop. Stop waiting for people to start caring about her.
‘Three years ago…’ Antonio trailed off.
Three years ago, he’d been at the tail-end of negotiations on a deal that was crucial to Alessina International.
They’d been back and forth for three days straight.
No one had slept, they’d barely eaten and they’d been surviving on coffee and adrenaline alone.
It was a deal that had made his company.
‘There’s a call from England, Signor Gallo. They say it’s about your wife?’
He remembered now. It had been on the tip of his tongue to say that he didn’t have a wife. But he did. He’d told his assistant to take down the number.
He’d said that he’d call back. But then…
‘Ms McKellen is calling from London.’
‘What is it?’ he’d shouted. ‘I cannot keep having these interruptions. Is it important?’ he’d asked.
‘No, signor. She says it’s not.’
That he remembered the call in bits and pieces was telling of how distracted he had been—not that it was in any way an excuse.
Whether the marriage was in name only or not, he should have called her back.
She had been in hospital , she had been unconscious and alone , and he had asked if it was important.
Bastardo.
He fisted the napkin in a white-knuckled grip, wishing it was his own throat. For all his superiority about protecting his family and being better than the men in his life, he was just the same. If not worse, because he’d actually thought himself better than that.
When you married her, she became your family. She became yours, not to own but to protect, to care for.
‘Ivy, I am sorry,’ he said to her now, and he was, truly and deeply. ‘I should have called you back. I should have…’
Been there for you.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said graciously. ‘And I was fine.’
‘You were hurt,’ he stressed, taking in the little scar on her jaw in a new light. He’d seen it. His subconscious had tried to remind him.
Ivy’s inhale shuddered in her chest. She didn’t want to talk about it, that was evident, but…this woman, his wife …she could have died and he’d not… He’d…
He swallowed.
‘I thought I was fine,’ she clarified. ‘Just cuts and bruises,’ she said with a shrug—as if it could offset the way her entire body had tensed as she told the story.
‘But while I was in hospital the vision in my left eye became very blurry, with dark spots. I was told that my retina had detached, but that it was okay—they would take me for surgery and repair it. No one was overly worried,’ Ivy added.
Surgery? Dio mio.
‘It was a success and I was discharged from hospital. But three days later, my vision was troubling me again. There was this flash—not like a camera flash, but enough to make me rush back to hospital. I was waiting for the doctor when—’ her hand came up to her left eye ‘—it was like a…blind slowly coming down over one eye. And…’ She didn’t have to finish her sentence.
He could see the fear in her eyes. She shook her head and shrugged again.
‘I was lucky, actually,’ Ivy pressed on, with forced positivity in her voice.
‘There was a specialist visiting from Greece. He explained how severe it was, but he told me how good he was,’ she said with a smile.
‘And he was true to his word. My sight will never be fully back, but he gave me more than I thought I would get.’
Antonio knew Ivy was downplaying how dangerous and terrifying it must have been.
‘And now? What is it like for you now?’ he forced himself to ask.
She took her time answering. ‘It’s better now.
I struggled. Before,’ she said, avoiding his gaze.
‘But now it’s better. I have double vision all the time, though.
My brain can’t seem to marry the information from both eyes,’ she admitted, taking another deep breath.
‘If I close my left eye then my right is okay, but it’s a lot of strain on one eye. ’
She pushed the food around her plate as if her hunger had fled as much as his.
‘You struggled?’ he dared to ask.
She pinned her lip with her teeth. ‘I was on my own,’ she confessed defiantly, as if he might judge her somehow.
‘Where were your family?’
She looked at him as if he were crazy. ‘My brother had just started Basic Training with the army, and I told you yesterday that my mother was abroad…’ She looked off to the side. ‘In America, I think.’
‘She didn’t come for you?’
Like I didn’t come for you? he thought, guilt a fierce punch to the gut.
‘No,’ she said, wincing a little. ‘The last I heard, she’d split from Ted, changed her number and moved on.’ Ivy offered him a small smile. ‘She was always terrible at being alone.’
He wanted to tell her that her mother hadn’t been alone—that she had two children—but he knew that Ivy already knew that.
The waiter arrived and took their plates away, saying something about dessert that Antonio didn’t catch as he stared at this woman who had battled so much for so long in silence.
‘Was there enough money left over from what I gave you to cushion you?’ He hoped to God the question didn’t sound crass, but he wanted—needed to know, that something he’d done had helped her.
He watched her swallow before answering, looking off to the side as if she could hide the emotions behind her words.
‘I used the money you gave me to pay for my brother’s rehabilitation,’ she said with a true smile. Small, but true. ‘I think I told you that he got into trouble when he was younger?’
‘You told me a little about it, that day in the café,’ he admitted.
Ivy caught his gaze, then looked away.
‘I shouldn’t have,’ she said, as if she felt ashamed for having shared her burden.
‘I’m glad you did,’ he said truthfully, admiring the woman he had married beyond anything he could have imagined.
Antonio swallowed in her silence.
‘It took a few years,’ she pressed on, ‘but he’s sober. And he fights for that, every single day,’ she said, a gleam of pride bringing life to her eyes once more.
‘And you? Did you use the money for yourself?’ he asked, guilt settling uneasily into his gut. He’d judged her for not doing more with the money, when in actual fact she deserved praise for achieving what she had .
Dio mio. What had he done?
‘I was able to put down a deposit on a flat for us and that would never have happened were it not for you. That was security and stability that neither I nor Jamie had ever experienced, and you made that happen.’
‘He came to my rescue.’
Antonio clenched his jaw. But he hadn’t, had he? He had paid her to marry him and then he had forgotten about her in his determination to make something of himself, to prove himself to his family. He hadn’t been there for her when she’d needed him most.
‘And that’s the flat you share now?’ he asked.
She didn’t want to lie to him, but she didn’t want to admit the truth. That in the months following the accident things had got so bad that she’d been forced to sell it. But now was not the time to be squeamish. She had gone this far, she might as well tell him everything.
‘After the accident I couldn’t work for a while, so I wasn’t able to keep up with the mortgage payments.’
It had been terrible. Days, weeks, months lost to a kind of emotional detachment that had mirrored the physical one.
Adjusting to the alteration in her eyesight had been so much more emotional than physical.
While there had been no pain, there was a kind of grief to navigate—grief over a loss that was a might-have-been: a life she could have had.
And while she had been so damn thankful that this was all that the accident had cost her, the true devastation had been the near constant battle with the fear that had consumed her life.
Fear that she could lose the sight in her other eye, fear that she would never not know fear, fear that this misery was all that she would feel for the rest of her life.
And that was before you got to the basics of everyday life.
Fear of getting on the wrong bus, of getting lost and having no one there to help.
Fear of not being able to work. Fear of the loss of her self-reliance.
And then some of those fears had come true.