Chapter 22 #2
“I couldn’t leave without telling you.” He doesn’t look away from me.
“I said I wouldn’t insult you by lying, and every word of it was a lie, because I loved you when I said it.
I’d loved you for a long time by then. I don’t know when it started, I’ve tried to find the beginning and I can’t.
I only know it was already true that night, and I stood in front of my wife and denied it to her face, believing I was being honest, because the only name I had for love was a wound, and you didn’t feel like a wound.
You felt like the first thing in my life that didn’t hurt.
” His eyes shine. “So I called it nothing. I am not asking you to find comfort in that. There is no comfort in it. You spent our marriage believing your husband didn’t love you, and the whole time, he did.
He was just too much of a damned fool to know his own heart.
You should have had a husband who knew. Instead you got one who figured it out too late. ”
I can’t breathe. For a moment, all I can hear is the sea and my own pulse. The envelope trembles in my hands.
All those nights I lay on my side of that enormous bed wondering what was wrong with me, what I lacked, what another woman had that I didn’t, and all that time there was nothing wrong with me at all. My husband loved me. He had loved me and been too blind to understand it.
I don’t know whether that makes it better or worse.
I only know I can barely stand here and hear it.
“So here’s the answer,” Cade says quietly, “as late as it is.”
He looks at me the way he looked at me from the front of that ballroom, like there is no one else in any room anywhere.
“I love you, Sienna.”
No hesitation. No careful consideration. No searching for the least damaging version of the truth.
“You are the first woman I have ever loved. And you will be the last.”
The sound that leaves me is humiliating. I turn away, but there’s nowhere on this porch to go that makes those words smaller.
“You don’t have to do anything with that,” he says, quieter now. “I’m not saying it to change your mind. The papers are signed. I just couldn’t leave you with the answer I gave you that night.”
I hear him take a breath.
“Goodbye, Sienna.”
Then he turns and starts toward the car. He brought me the divorce I demanded, apologized without asking to be forgiven, told me he loves me without asking me to stay, and now he is going to walk back to his car because he believes that is what I want.
He isn’t slowing down. He isn’t looking back.
He is actually leaving.
Panic, sudden and furious, punches through the anger.
And right behind the panic comes the truth—the humiliating, stubborn, wretched truth I’ve been running from: I still love him.
God help me, I love him.
I didn’t pack my bags in the middle of the night because I fell out of love.
I didn’t hire a lawyer because I’d stopped wanting a life with him.
I left because loving Cade Belluomo while he looked through me was hollowing me out from the inside.
I spent years believing there was some fatal flaw in me, some missing piece that kept me from earning the devotion he gave so easily to Ashley.
I hadn’t wanted his money, the houses, the prestige, or an apology delivered by a broken man on my porch.
I had just wanted him to love me back.
And now he does. He sat alone in the dark and wept onto divorce papers because he finally understands, and he is walking away down my driveway because he thinks giving me what I asked for is the only way left to honor it.
If I let him get in that car, I get the victory. I get to keep my pride. I get to be the righteous, injured party who walked away and never looked back.
And I will spend the rest of my life regretting that I finally heard him say he loved me, then stood on this porch and watched him drive away.
“Cade.”
He stops in the yard. His back is to me, and his shoulders go very still. He doesn’t turn around. For a second, I think he can’t. The leaving is all he has left to give me, and if he turns around he might not be able to finish giving it.
“Don’t go.”
Then he turns, slowly, and the hope in his face is so raw and so terrified that I feel it in my own body, and I watch him refuse to trust it.
“Sienna.”
“I don’t know what this means,” I say, because it’s true, and because he deserves the truth even now. Especially now.
“Okay.”
“I’m still angry with you.”
“I know.”
“I’m probably going to be angry with you for a long time.”
One corner of his mouth lifts. “I’d be concerned if you weren’t.”
A wet laugh escapes me, and he looks like the sound hurts him.
“I am not tearing up these papers.”
“I wouldn’t assume you were.”
“And I’m not saying everything is fixed because you finally said it.”
“I would never ask you to.”
“Stop being so reasonable. It’s irritating.”
“I can be less reasonable if that would help.”
That is nearly the man I married. Another laugh pushes through the tears. God, I’ve missed him. The realization is so simple and so painful that it takes the last of my defenses with it.
I turn and crouch long enough to lay the envelope just inside the door, safely out of the wind. I smooth one hand over it before I straighten.
When I turn back, he still hasn’t moved. I go down the steps and cross the yard to him, stopping close enough to see the exhaustion in his face.
Then I lift my hand and touch his face.
His eyes close. The reaction is so immediate, so whole, that my breath catches, this man who flinches at nothing, undone by a palm against his cheek.
“I missed you,” I whisper.
His eyes open, and whatever control he had left goes out of them. “Sienna.”
“I hated missing you.”
“I can imagine.”
“No, you can’t.”