20. Ariah
— ? —
Ariah
“You saw the statement.”
Pietro’s voice is careful, neutral, the way it’s been for weeks now, like he’s constantly bracing for impact.
We’re in my apartment, the twins at preschool, the space between us filled with all the things we haven’t said. The cold I had weeks ago is long gone, but the work fatigue lingers, late nights at my bench, early mornings with the children.
I’m tired in a way that goes deeper than sleep. Late morning light filters through the windows, catching dust motes in the air, making the whole room feel suspended somehow. Outside of time.
“Piper showed me.”
“What did you think?”
I’ve been asking myself that question since yesterday morning. What did I think, watching my name finally attached to the work I created? What did I feel, seeing the public acknowledgment of everything that was stolen from me?
The truth is, I don’t know how to feel. There’s relief, yes - a vindication I’ve craved so long it became background noise in my life.
But there’s also anger. Anger that it took this long.
Anger that it required our marriage to collapse before anyone thought my contributions mattered.
Anger that I can’t even enjoy the acknowledgment without wondering what he expects in return.
“I think it should have happened years ago,” I say finally. “I think it’s a correction, not a gift.”
“You’re right. It is.”
“Then why do you look like you’re waiting for me to thank you?”
He flinches, just slightly. I know I’m being harsh. I can feel the sharp edges in my own voice but I’m tired of being grateful for crumbs. Tired of having to perform appreciation for things that should have been mine all along.
“I’m not waiting for thanks. I just…” He runs a hand through his hair, a gesture I know well. Frustration. Uncertainty. “I wanted you to know it wasn’t about making you forgive me. It was about telling the truth.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?” He sounds uncertain. “That’s it?”
“What do you want me to say, Pietro? That I’m overwhelmed with gratitude?
That this fixes everything?” I sit down on the edge of the couch, suddenly tired.
“I spent six years watching my work get absorbed into your family’s empire.
Six years of my ideas credited to ‘the merger’ or ‘the partnership’ or just…
nobody. A press release doesn’t undo that. ”
“I know it doesn’t.”
“Then what do you want?”
He’s quiet for a long moment, and I watch his face go through something I can’t quite name. He moves to the chair across from me, sits down heavily, like the weight of what he’s about to say is already dragging at him.
“I want to explain what you heard. That night. The anniversary.”
My whole body goes tense. We’ve danced around this - the overheard sentence, the words that broke everything - but we’ve never directly addressed it.
He tried on the phone when everything was still fresh and bleeding.
Said something about guilt, about context, but I wasn’t ready to hear him then. Hung up before he could finish.
Maybe I’m ready now. Maybe not. But he’s sitting here with that look on his face, the one that says he’s going to say the thing whether I want to hear it or not.
“You said you didn’t know if you should have married me. You said the love wasn’t there.”
“That’s what you heard.” He leans forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped together so tight his knuckles go white. “But that’s not what I meant. And I know you hung up before I could explain it properly, and I know you had every right to, but - please. Let me try again.”
I don’t say anything. Just wait.
“I was talking to my mother,” he says. “About guilt. About watching you disappear into a life you never signed up for.”
“You told me that. On the phone.”
“I know. But I didn’t explain it well.” He looks at me, and his eyes are dark with something that might be shame.
Something old and heavy. “When I met you, you were building an empire, Ariah. You were twenty-four years old and you’d already founded Maison d’Emery by yourself, and you had fire.
You had this… this certainty about who you were and what you could make.
You walked into rooms like you belonged there, like anyone who questioned you was simply wrong.
You were the most alive person I’d ever met. ”
The words hit me somewhere soft, somewhere I’ve been protecting. I remember being that person. Sometimes it feels like a different life entirely.
“And then you married me,” he continues, his voice roughening. “And the merger happened. And your mother-in-law hated you from day one. And the business pages stopped mentioning your name. And somewhere along the way, all of that fire just… faded. And I watched it happen. And I let it.”
“You more than let it.” The words come out sharper than I intended.
“You contributed to it. All those nights you didn’t come home.
All those meetings where you didn’t correct people when they gave Serena credit for my designs.
All those times your mother insulted me to my face and you just - stood there. ”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because from where I was standing, it looked a lot like you agreed with her. Like you thought I was as useless and decorative as she wanted me to be.”
“I never thought that.” His voice cracks slightly.
“Never, Ariah. I just - I didn’t know how to fight her.
I spent my whole life learning to work around her, to accommodate her, to pick battles I could win and avoid the ones I couldn’t.
And I told myself I was protecting you by not making things worse, but I wasn’t. I was just being a coward.”
The admission hangs between us. I don’t know what to do with it.
“When I said the love wasn’t there like it used to be,” he says slowly, “I meant my love. The way I showed it. Because it wasn’t…
I stopped showing you. I stopped making you feel loved.
I stopped doing the work that love requires.
” He swallows hard. “I would come home late and find you already asleep, and I would lie there next to you and think about how I was failing you, and instead of fixing it I just… kept failing. Because by then I didn’t know how to stop. ”
I think about all the nights I lay awake wondering if he’d ever cared at all.
All the times I told myself the distance was normal, that marriages changed, that expecting him to show up was asking too much.
All the ways I made myself smaller and smaller, trying to fit into the space he’d left for me, the space that kept shrinking until there was barely room to breathe.
“That doesn’t fix anything,” I say, and my voice is thick. I’m not going to cry. I’m not. “Understanding what you meant doesn’t undo the years you weren’t there.”
“I know.”
“It doesn’t erase the fact that you chose work over your family. That you let your mother treat me like dirt. That you handed my work to other people and never said a word.”
“I know.”
“It doesn’t make up for the fact that I spent three years fearing you regretted marrying me. Three years wondering if you were just waiting for an excuse to leave.”
“I know.” His voice is barely above a whisper now. “I know, Ariah. None of this makes up for it. I’m not trying to excuse myself. I’m just trying to tell you what was actually happening in my head, even though I know that’s not the same as what was happening in our marriage.”
“Then why tell me? Why now?”
“Because you deserve to know you were never unloved.”
I have to look away, have to stare at the wall with its slightly crooked picture frame (I keep meaning to fix that) because if I keep looking at his face I’m going to lose whatever composure I have left.
“You were always loved, Ariah.”
He leans forward, and there’s an intensity in his expression I haven’t seen since before everything fell apart. Maybe since before the twins were born, back when we were still new to each other, still learning.
“Even when I was terrible at showing it. Even when I disappeared into work and let my mother fill the space I left behind. Every morning I woke up next to you, I knew I was the luckiest man alive. I just… forgot to tell you that. For years, I forgot to tell you.”
My throat is tight. I don’t want to cry, crying feels like giving him something he hasn’t earned but the pressure behind my eyes is building. I blink hard, dig my fingernails into my palm. Focus.
“I remember the night I knew I was in love with you,” he says quietly.
“Your workshop, the one you had before we moved into the house. You were bent over your bench, and you had this strand of silver wire in your hands, twisting it into something I couldn’t even visualize yet, and the light was catching your eyes, and I thought… ”
He stops. Swallows.
“I thought they looked like sapphires. That specific blue. Deep and clear and full of light. I stood in the doorway for probably five minutes just watching you work, and you were so focused you didn’t even notice me, and I remember thinking that I could spend my entire life trying to be worthy of you and never quite get there. ”
“Pietro…”
“Your eyes remind me of sapphires.” He says it so simply and so seriously that my breath catches. “They always have. I used to look at you and think about how I could never make anything that beautiful. How I could spend my whole life trying and never come close.”
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to receive this - this confession that rewrites everything I thought I knew about the last three years.
This man who apparently loved me the whole time he was failing to show it, who watched me disappear and hated himself for it but never figured out how to stop the bleeding.
It doesn’t excuse anything. That’s what I keep coming back to. The love in his head wasn’t the love I needed in my life. The guilt he felt didn’t translate into action. Understanding his intentions doesn’t heal the wounds his absence caused.
But…
But something about knowing shifts the ground under my feet, just slightly. Rearranges the story I’ve been telling myself.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” he says. “I’m just asking you to know the truth.”
The truth. As if the truth is simple. As if knowing his intent erases the impact of his actions. As if understanding makes the wound any less deep or the scar any less permanent.
But something shifts in my chest anyway. Some small, guarded piece of me unclenches, just a little.
I think about last week, when he showed up for his visitation fifteen minutes early and spent the extra time helping Luca practice writing his name.
I think about the tea he makes now, every visit, without being asked.
I think about the way he actually listens when the twins talk, instead of doing the distracted nodding I got used to during our marriage.
Small things. Specific things. Not grand gestures or pretty speeches - just the daily evidence of someone trying to be different.
“I need time,” I say finally, and my voice comes out smaller than I want it to. “I need… I don’t know what I need. Space to think. Space to feel whatever I’m feeling without you watching me feel it.”
“Take all the time you want.” He stands, moving toward the door. His footsteps are quiet on my floor, careful, like he’s trying not to disturb the air. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He pauses at the door, turns back. “I’m fighting them, by the way. My mother and Serena. Their custody threats. I wanted you to know - whatever happens between us, I’m on your side. The children belong with you. I’ll make sure everyone knows that’s my position.”
Then he’s gone, and I’m alone in my apartment with the late morning light and the slightly crooked picture frame and a heart that doesn’t know what to do with itself.
I sit on my couch and stare at nothing for a long time.
The thing about anger is that it’s simple. Clean. You know where you stand with anger - you know who wronged you and why and what it would take to make it right (nothing, usually, which is why anger is so seductive; it asks nothing of you except to keep burning).
But this.
This complicated tangle of understanding and resentment and reluctant compassion, this is harder.
This requires me to hold two things at once: the truth of my pain and the truth of his.
The fact that he failed me and the fact that he never meant to.
The reality that intentions don’t matter and the reality that, somehow, they kind of do.
I think about the woman I was at twenty-four, building Maison d’Emery with nothing but ambition and talent and the unshakeable belief that I could make something beautiful.
I think about the woman I became over six years of marriage.
Smaller, quieter, so focused on surviving that I forgot what it felt like to thrive.
I think about sapphires. About the way he said it, so plain and serious, like he was stating an obvious fact of the universe.
Something stirs in my chest. Something I thought I’d killed a long time ago.
I recognize it, finally. It’s hope.
It terrifies me more than the anger ever did.