All of us eating out of the palm of her hand.
And now my life, my wife, was sitting at a desk, as frozen as ice, looking over the last contents of her mother’s things.
After she was done, set her head down against the desk. I moved from my place in the corner and picked her up, about to bring her to the bathroom to wash her from head to toe, but she shook her head and said, “bed.”
I set her down in it, and when I went to change her clothes, she told me no again. Then she curled in on herself and closed her eyes.
She wasn’t sleeping.
She was letting the pain flow through her, and I had no idea how to fucking stop it.
I couldn’t.
The worse fucking thing for a man like me. A man who thrived on discipline and control.
But a woman was a soft creature who leaned on a man for physical strength, deserved to be protected and cared for, wined and dined, read poetry to and sang to. She deserved to feel how hot passion could run through a man’s veins for her, to be totally consumed by his love and devotion. To be in awe at the things he said, and not because a boy would find them ridiculous, over the top, or too embarrassing to say—heat of the moment or not.
To take those things and create strength out of them.
So, I knew when a woman entered the state that my wife was in, she needed my strength more than ever, even if it was subtle, quiet and strong.
Deep down in my heart, though, in the darkest part only she could shine light on, her grief was killing me.
I couldn’t save her from it.
I sat down on the chair she’d been sitting in and set my hands over my face. I listened to her breathing, but it seemed all I could hear was her shattering heartbreak. I heard her sniffle but felt the tears that refused to fall because they were as thick as blood.
I listened. I heard. I suffered with her, though, tapping into the control I thrived on, I kept my shoulders squared and my heart calm.
And when the day came that she sat up, her hair a tangled mess, her eyes red and puffy, along with her face, though she hadn’t been crying, and asked me, “Is she dead, Matteo?”
I couldn’t answer her right away.
She was ripping my heart out before I ripped hers out with the truth. I hadn’t given her the coroner’s report. She didn’t need to see it. See something so cold and calculated when it came to her mamma.
“I want you to tell me,” she whispered. “You love me enough. You’ll tell me with love. If not…when you look at me, it’ll be like looking at an animal that’s struggling to breathe, the truth the only antidote.”
Or fucking poison.
A sound ripped through me, a feral animalistic sound that seemed to tear a vital piece of my heart from its roots. It was silent outside of me, but my ears rang.
“She, ah.” I cleared my throat. “She’s gone, baby.”
She looked down at her hands, the little veins there apparent, like she was freezing, even though the cottages were on the warmer side. She nodded. Nodded. Nodded. “How?” If I wouldn’t have been paying such attention, I would have missed the question, but it sounded like a scream in my ears, the ringing even louder after it faded.
I decided in the moment to skip the more gruesome details and give her the one-word cause. “Régine.”
“Oh.” She curled in on herself, and a scream in the face of nightmares tore out of her, like she’d been holding it in for much too long. She started to sob so loud, I heard wings flapping outside of our room, the birds in the magnolia tree frightened away.
Three weeks later my wife, a skeleton of her former self, not only just in flesh, asked me to take her to her mamma.
We left the next day, and she curled away from the sun, any light, hiding herself underneath my arm, lost in complete darkness.
Chapter 44
Stella
Ididn’t even bother to look out the window as we took the roads back to my mom. I had a feeling she had been…killed (my fists clenched against Matteo’s suit jacket when I thought the word) in the same place she’d lived when I’d been with her. Matteo hadn’t given me details, and I still didn’t want them; not yet. It was enough to know that the evil bitch had taken me away from my mom, and my mom away from me.
