“What?” I breathed.
“You heard me. The end.” He held up a hand and walked off.
Brando stared after him. Scarlett stared at me.
“What do I do?” I barely got out.
She took my hand and kept it in hers. “Nothing,bebe. There’s nothing you can do. Not about this.”
“What happens now?” My voice was so low, I doubted either of them heard me, but Brando did.
He cleared his throat. “Matteo will decide when to give up his right. My son is a man, and if this is the decision he makes, it’s on him.” He said something in gruff Italian and then started for our apartment.
I looked at Scarlett. “What did he say?” I’d learned my lines for the movie, but sometimes, the words were beyond me. Especially if it was in a different dialect.
She wiped her eyes, though she wasn’t crying. “‘You did nothing wrong, daughter of my heart. Do not allow a decision you have no control over to hurt you. In our world, it is not the end of it.’”
In our world, it is not the end of it.
That was because Brando had never really wanted to be a part of his birthright. Scarlett had stumbled into it years ago, and they both got sucked into it. Over the years, Scarlett said Brando had accepted it, but he gave up his right to rule to Rocco. Brando didn’t want bad blood with his brother over something that had never been important to him.
Brando’s wife was the most important to him.
The end.
Matteo was doing the same for me.
Except, even though Brando and Scarlett had given their children lives outside of the family’s walls, created something entirely separate for them in Natchitoches, Matteo had always chosen the Faustis. If one day he resented me for this choice, I couldn’t live with it. I was barely skirting around the fact that he harbored a bit of that when I’d lied to him about not getting my test results back.
That night, after we slipped into bed, I took his hand and kissed it, setting it on my stomach after. “If you do this,” I whispered, “for the wrong reasons, like a path two other people had to walk in life, it will make me very unhappy down to my soul, Matteo Fausti. You’re not your grandfather, and I’m not Grazia Angeli. I don’t even have that much Italian in me.” I’d found out I had Italian ancestors on both sides of my family, but like, only four. “There are differences. And…what about this? What if our story will complete theirs? Give it a second chance? What if things work out differently for us? I believe they will. I do. Down to the marrow of my bones. I have options she didn’t.”
Like getting the procedure done after the baby was born, but I refused to think about that until I absolutely had to. I loved being pregnant. And I already loved being a mom. When I found out I was pregnant, it was like I slipped into a role I was meant for my entire life.
So easy. So natural. So right.
What if I got to keep it all? The husband. The children. And the acting career?
That would be…like divine intervention after the hell I’d been in. That was how good it felt in my soul.
“No more children,” Matteo said.
“You don’t get to make that choice for me, Matteo.”
“I don’t,” he said. “But I get to make it for me, Estella.”
“So, what, no more sex?”
“If that’s the fucking case.” He shrugged.
My mind wasn’t even playing around when the first thought that came to it was…just steal his sperm from him then.Maybe we wouldn’t have sex, but he had needs…we’d have to do something sometime, right?
Damn. What the hell was I even thinking? Stealing my husband’s sperm?! (Was it even considered stealing since he’d vowed to me that whatever was his was mine? A thought for another day, though.) It had to be the stress. Scarlett told me she cracked up laughing when she was overly stressed. Maybe I just had insane thoughts that would make people laugh if they were ever aired.
I hadn’t planned on telling anyone that, except...what he’d said made me mad, so I said the thought aloud.
His eyes turned to mine slowly. “You will steal my sperm.”
“Yeah.” I shrugged, just like he had. “If that’s what it takes. And is it really considered stealing if what’s yours is mine and what’s mine is yours?”
