Noemi whispered, “Okay,” and then left.
“Talk to me,” I said to my wife.
She sighed, turning to look at me again. “It would be nice to go to Los Angeles. See what it’s all about. It feels like something I’d be interested in doing. But.” She hesitated. “I think it’s time for me to face all that needs facing, Teo. I’m so happy, deliriously happy, but in the quiet times, I hear ghosts. I feel something—” she touched her chest “—clawing at me. Like all the shit I’ve been burying is about to come to the surface, whether I want it to or not. Maybe being in the place I’ve always wanted to go back to will—” she paused, gauging my reaction to what she was going to say next “—tear me open enough to…bring it all to the surface so I’m forced to deal with it.”
All the blood in my veins froze before a mad rush of it thawed them out. My job as her husband was to keep her whole. Not allow anything in this world to tear her apart. And she wastelling me—asking me—to sit back and watch while her history would cause a wound that would no fucking doubt leave a scar. I would make sure she came back to me, but I knew it was out of my fucking control how it would change her.
I knew how it felt to almost lose two parents. To think, even with siblings and a big family, that nothing would ever be the same without my mother and father. It changed me, all my siblings, in ways we didn’t discuss. Especially since it would have been Brando Fausti’s decision to leave us if mamma had. I understood it after I’d met Stella, but before, it was a fucking mystery I thought could never be solved.
“Teo.” She squeezed my arm. “I need you for this. I—I can’t make this without you.” Then it seemed like all her strength faded. She fell against me, hiding her face against my chest.
I picked her up, feeling her heavy burdens like they were my own, and carried her inside, feeding her, packing her things, refusing to let her walk.
The next evening, we touched down in Los Angeles just as the sun was setting.
For a place where stars supposedly lived, not even one seemed to exist in the sky.
Chapter 37
Stella
Los Angeles.
What did I think about it?
I wasn’t sure yet. After a long-ass flight, we took a helicopter to a house in the hills. The sun had started to sink when we were on the plane, but by the time the helicopter landed on the private pad, it had totally disappeared and left behind a sky void of stars.
It stirred something inside of me. Something that felt like longing after being spoiled by the stars in Tuscany, even Sicily. Matteo had been quiet, but that didn’t mean he had gone silent. He was more attentive to me, watching me more closely, tender touches that resonated down to the brittle feel of my bones.
I knew in Sicily that I needed to go home—to Louisiana. As much fun as I was having with my husband, on the opposite side of the coin, guilt was eating me alive.
How could I go on having all this fun when I had no idea where my mom was?
Wasn’t it so unfair to her for me to go on with life burying the hurt down? The hurt that should honor her?
Deep down, I knew she would want me to be happy. She’d told me once that was all she wanted for me. To live a healthy and happy life. Matteo made me so happy that I could hardly seestraight, and it never felt like I was walking, always floating. But the other side to me, the dark side, was slowly spreading through me. It was taking over. And I knew if I didn’t face it, it would consume me.
It felt like the sadness (and that was a lesser term for what it was) was made of barbed wire, and it was shredding me on the inside, slowly leaking all the hurt and ghosts, letting them loose inside of me. They had nowhere to go, so they were taking control, causing havoc.
Even if Matteo could never understand, fully, what I’d been through, something told me he was feeling the pain I was. Even though we hadn’t even known each other long, it felt like time didn’t mean anything. Not when it came to a love that had been written in the stars.
I liked to think that Matteo was my blessing that came from an awful punishment.
Not even that amazing gift, though, could steal away the memories and hide them from me. I knew better. I’d buried them for so long, deep, deep, deep inside of me, and they were rising like a threatening tide.
When I was in that gorgeous water in Sicily, sometimes I would look up and think, are the stars at the bottom of the sky, and whoever’s on the opposite side doesn’t get to see them, just like we don’t get to see what’s at the bottom of the sea?
Only Matteo Fausti, and maybe his mamma and sister, could see all the things I hid at the bottom of my own ocean of secrets. More than that, they seemed to feel them with me. Maybe that was how I was surviving this. They were taking some of the hurt for their own.
I tried to ignore the barbs stabbing me where no one could see, but I could feel them as we entered the house from the helipad. The So Cal house overlooked the ocean and was fit for any star. When I’d asked Matteo on the plane where we werestaying, and he told me here, I’d asked him if the house was a rental. He’d told me no, and the meeting Noemi had set up was going to take place in a hotel in Hollywood.
Matteo squeezed my hand, his eyes searching mine as his men did another sweep of the house. He pulled me so fast into him that I gasped. But it was a tender move, one that brought me closer to him. He kissed me all the way to my ear and then whispered four words, “You tell me when.”
You tell me when.
Tell him when it was time for me to turn around and fully face my past.
I nodded, then shook my head, then nodded again. “Will you tell me when it’s time?”
