“This isn’t you,” he says, pulling a bitter laugh out of me.
“And was it me when I was being played, about to marry a woman who was trying to pull the same scam on three different men at the same time?”
“You can’t say that for sure.”
“You saw the photos.”
“You mean the ones you scattered across the floor for the whole island to see? That’s not okay, Nero. That’s a crime, for fuck’s sake.”
“I tore them up the first time. I never wanted to see those images again. Honestly, I wanted to bleach my brain just to erase them. But when I opened my email this morning, I discovered my mother had kindly sent me the digital files.” I laugh, hollow and sour, because I know perfectly well that kindness was the last thing motivating Lysandra’s actions. “I printed them out on pure masochistic instinct—bordering on sadistic.”
“I noticed,” he says, accusing.
I throw my head back against the chair and drag it side to side against the leather, shaking my head.
“They were for me. When I opened that damn email, saw the photos again, and felt the hate light up my veins all over, I realized I was already starting to forget. And I can’t allow myself to forget. I reprinted the photos so that when my stupid heart tries to push me into giving Nina a chance to explain herself, I can remind it that what she did is unforgivable.”
“That’s st—”
“I knew she’d come back,” I say, cutting him off. He said he came to listen, didn’t he? “The other two she was cheating on me with—or cheating with me, I honestly don’t know what the right semantics are here—they left Greece. I was her last option. I knew she’d come back.”
“Every story has two sides, Nero. You shouldn’t stop yourself from hearing the other one,” Atlas warns.
I take a long pull from the whiskey before straightening in the chair, forcing my spine upright.
“You want her for yourself? Is that it?” I shrug. “Be my guest.” I gesture toward the door. “Honestly, it probably won’t even be hard.”
CHAPTER 46
NINA MARCHESI
I clench my teeth hard when the neighbor I used to greet whenever we crossed paths crosses the street just to avoid walking on the same sidewalk as me. The indifferent expression on my face doesn’t waver, though. Not here. Not now.
The next person in my path isn’t nearly as subtle. Cleonte, the neighborhood pharmacist—an elderly man with white beard and mustache—spits on the ground after staring at me for a few seconds. I keep walking, unshaken.
Not here. Not now. Five gates to go, Nina. Just five more gates.
I quicken my pace when I see a group approaching. I can handle one person’s contempt at a time, but a group—all at once—I’m afraid would be too much, and I’d crumble before reaching the safety of my house, now just three gates ahead.
The entire island knows.
Every breathing soul in Khione knows and is talking about Nero humiliating me on the sidewalk outside the exporting company—and somehow they’ve all seen the same photos he shoved in my face. How much must he hate me to have been capable of that? Was everything he said, everything he did, not enough?
I get inside and let my body fall against the door the moment I close it. Tears burst from my eyes, immediately followed by sobs tearing from my throat. My shoulders shake, and I can’t stop myself from nearly screaming in the middle of a despair that neither fades nor eases. The emptiness on my right ring finger bears witness to that.
Two weeks ago, Atlas dropped me off at home, and I barely made it to the bathroom in time to avoid throwing up all over myself. It amazes me that I managed to delay my body’s inevitable reaction to those photos for so long. Disgust.
Not at the images—but at what they meant. Proof of a betrayal that never happened, that I could never have committed. The revulsion overtook me all at once, until I thought I’d die before I stopped expelling everything I had—and didn’t have—inside me.
My mother came home from the shop a few hours later, brought back by the buzz that had already begun to roam the island. For the second time in a short span, Rosa held me while I fell apart in tears because of Nero Zanthos.
I told myself I’d give myself one day to grieve. One day—and then I’d move on. I’d continue my life, look for a job, do my best to raise my child to become a man who would never expose any woman to anything even remotely like the humiliation I’d been subjected to.
I couldn’t get out of bed for five days.
Amid the despair and the dull pain suffocating my chest, I lost track of time and space, reduced to crying, thinking, growing exhausted from doing both, and falling asleep only to wake a few hours later and do it all again. I got up on the sixth day—not because I intended to immediately leave everything behind and act like I was some unbreakable wonder woman, but because I knew I couldn’t think only of myself.
What I didn’t expect was that the entire island would have already judged and condemned me as the shameless woman who tried to trap its most precious jewel with a pregnancy.
