Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live.
I’m home, my husband. Here you live, and here I will live.
“You got this,” I said to myself. “He’s waiting.”
Deciding to jump all in, I didn’t stop on the porch, just shoved the door open and propelled myself inside.
All I could do was stand in the middle of the room and let the tide take me under.
The house had been empty of people for a while, but we had someone who came in and cleaned once a week. It smelled empty, yet the scent of us still lingered in the air, in all the fibers, in the wood. Just a short time we had had here, but it was enough. We had made an impression on this house, just as it had made an impression on us.
“Home,” I whispered. “Back. I’m back.” A terrible pain stabbed me in the heart, both regret and thankfulness, and the sobs came harder.
My eyes were full of blinding tears, but I felt the strong arms that wrapped around me, and we both fell to the floor. His tears mixed with mine, salty, burning the cut on my lip, but healing at the same time. Safe. I was safe, safe in the arms of my home. Not the four walls that surrounded us, but him.
“You are my home,” I cried into his shoulder. “You’ve always beenmyhome.”
He rocked me, holding on to the point that I became breathless. “You’re home, my baby. You’re home. You came back to me.”
“I’ve been with you.” I sniffed.
“No, not like this. Without you, this place was just a place. Now it’s our home. I suffered—ah.” He couldn’t go on.
This house had become a symbol for the both of us, of our love, and more than that, a refuge from the world. He knew that I had never truly called any one place home until I set foot through those doors. This was mine. His. Ours. This wasus, safe from the world and all its demands. This was our past, present, and future.
He pulled back to take my face in his hands, and right before he came in to kiss me, he stilled. Slowly at first, then frantic, he took in the state of my face.
“Ah!” I hissed, my hand coming up to touch the bruise on the left side of my face. Even my jaw was sore, and the shock was coming through as he touched me, too hard, not realizing.
He dropped his hands as though my face had split in two. “Scarlett.”
“I—I fell down the steps at my parents’ house, rushing to get here.”
I wanted to tell him the entire truth, I did, but the look on his face scared me. It was calm, too calm—eerie, like the sky before a hurricane. Besides, I refused to let Charlotte ruin this moment for us.
His eyes narrowed in response to the partial lie; one thing in life I didn’t lack was balance. Rarely did I trip or stumble. Awareness of my body and how it moved was the same as breathing to me. He knew it.
“Tell me,” he demanded, his voice barely above a whisper.
I shook my head, looking down at my hands. A bruise was starting to appear around my knuckles, a blossoming eggplant tinged with crimson. “I told you,” I whispered. “I fell.”
He stood so fast that the air surged up with the movement.
“Brando!”
Without asking, he bent down and lifted me off my feet, almost carting me out to the porch.
Guido and Nino stood even straighter when they saw us, too quick to have been caught off guard; they were waiting, knowing what was coming.
“Tell me what happened to my wife,” Brando snapped in Italian.
It was Guido who spoke up. “Your wife fell down the stairs, after the wicked sister put a leg out to trip her.”
Wicked sister. I liked that one. So apt.
Just like that, though, the truth floated out into the open. I almost wanted to reach behind me and shut our door, to protect our first moments back from such heinous honesty.
Brando looked down at me, almost incredulous, before each feature smoothed out, that eerie madness he kept locked in a secret place shoved back into the tight holding cell.
