15. Ysabelle
— ? —
Ysabelle
I hear him before I can open my eyes.
“I love you.”
His voice is rough, broken, the sound of years of held-in words finally coming loose.
“I’m sorry it took this to say it. You deserved to hear it every day, and you got it in pieces, in the dark, when it was easiest for me.”
My head hurts. My body feels heavy. But his voice is an anchor, pulling me back to the surface.
“I don’t know if you can hear me. The doctors say you’re stable, that the baby’s fine. But I need you to know.” He pauses. I feel his hand tighten on mine. “You’re my life, Ysabelle. The whole of it. I won’t stop trying to be worth that. I can’t.”
I open my eyes.
He’s sitting beside my bed. His clothes are rumpled. His face is haggard. He looks a decade older than he did yesterday.
He came within an inch of losing everything, and it’s written all over him.
“Say it again,” I whisper.
His head snaps up. His eyes meet mine, wide and wet.
“Ysabelle-”
“Say it again.”
“I love you,” he says, the words tumbling out after years of being dammed up. “I love you, and I should have said it every single day.”
“Again.”
“I love you. I’ll say it every day for the rest of our lives. I’ll say it until you believe it. Until you feel it in your bones. I love you.”
I reach for him. It hurts to move, but I don’t care. My hand finds his face, his jaw rough with stubble, his skin damp with tears.
“The baby?” I ask.
“The baby’s fine. Strong heartbeat.” He turns his face into my palm. Kisses it. “You’re both going to be okay.”
My eyes close, and I let the relief come.
“Giulietta?”
“Gone. The police have her.” He pauses. “She won’t come near you again. I’ll make sure of it.”
“You didn’t-”
“I wanted to.” His voice is flat and honest. “I wanted to kill her with my bare hands. But you’re more important than my rage. Our baby is more important.”
I open my eyes again and look at this man, my husband, who broke my heart and then spent weeks putting it back together, piece by piece.
“Take me home,” I say.
He blinks. “What?”
“Home home. Our house. Take me home.”
“Ysabelle, the doctors want to keep you overnight-”
“Tomorrow then. When they release me.” I pull him closer and make him meet my eyes. “This is your last chance, Pietro. One more. Don’t make me regret it.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise me.” It comes out smaller than I mean it to.
“On my life,” he says, and kisses my forehead, my cheek, my mouth, so gentle it makes me ache. “On our baby’s life.”
The door opens. Remedios enters, her face drawn with worry that softens when she sees me awake.
“She’s been arrested,” Remedios says. “Giulietta. The police took her an hour ago. They found evidence on her phone, messages, plans to find you, threats against Ysabelle.” She pauses. “Anton has been with the police since it happened. The DA is pushing to hold her without bail.”
“Good,” I say.
It’s all I can say. All I have the energy for.
So she lost. The man she wanted, the place beside him she tried to take, the whole version of my life she thought she could slip into the moment I was gone. I’m too tired for triumph. What I feel is the quiet click of a door finally closing.
Pietro adjusts my pillows, pulls the blanket higher, and fusses over me in a way that should be annoying but isn’t.
“The nursery,” I say. My voice is fading, sleep pulling at me. “Yellow walls.”
“And the rocking chair by the window,” he says, and there’s a smile in it. “I haven’t forgotten a word of it.”
I smile and close my eyes.
“Stay with me,” I murmur.
The bed shifts, and he climbs in beside me, careful of my IV, careful of my wound, fitting himself around me the way he has a thousand times before.
“Always,” he says.
His arms wrap around me. His hand rests on my stomach, where our baby sleeps safe and unaware. His breath is warm against my neck.
There are stitches behind my ear and a needle taped into my arm and I nearly lost everything today, and still, when his body curves warm and solid around mine in the narrow bed, I lean back into it, one more inch, and let myself be held by the man I almost didn’t get to want anything from ever again.
And for the first time in months, when I close my eyes, I’m not seven years old under a table waiting for the roof to come down. I’m just a woman in a bed, holding on to what I almost lost, letting it hold me back.