She let out an exasperated huff. “I know your power in the world is great, but you do not reign over my body.”
Alessandro managed to look both doubtful and smug, and Ann-Sophie felt a flash of something more complicated than desire, adding more fuel to the cauldron of her emotions.
“Your parents are callous and cruel,” she continued, “and as far as I can tell, you’ve been bottling up your very understandable anger for over a decade, pretending that nothing touches you. Or maybe you even started to believe it.” She ignored his frown and continued. “Of course, it’s going to be messy when it comes out. The real question is what you will choose to do now.”
“I’m doing what’s best for all three of us,” he said, frustration seeping into his voice.
“You’re doing what’s easiest instead of fighting for what we could have,” she snapped. Ann-Sophie regretted her words even before his expression shuttered. Desperation was starting to take hold inside her.
“I love you,” she insisted. “Not some public image of you but the man I have spent the past month with. That’s why I married you. Not just for the baby. I know I was not supposed to fall in love with you, but I have.”
And as she spoke the words, she felt the depth of truth behind them. She had told herself marriage was best for the baby, but she knew better than anyone that it was love, not marriage, that made the biggest difference for a child. Alessandro’s parents were a stark reminder.
His expression was hard and cold. “You know I cannot give you what you’re asking me for. I was clear from the beginning.”
She had not asked him for love, not directly, but he had heard it, anyway. But this was a want, not a need, she told herself. Even if it did not feel that way. Even if it felt like something inside her was breaking.
“That is your final decision?” she asked softly.
“It is not a decision. It is our reality.”
Ann-Sophie swallowed and forced herself to do what was right. For all three of them.
“Then I absolve you of your promise. I am not afraid of raising a child on my own. Of being on my own.” Her voice was so much stronger than she felt. “I will never keep you away from your son—it will be too hard for us to spend time together if you refuse to let yourself free of the grip that the past has on you. So whatever we had between us has to end. I don’t want to see you, at least until this is less painful.”
He flinched, as if she had slapped him. “You knew I had to offer. You accepted that.”
“It’s not enough.” The wordenoughfelt strange as she spoke it, as if it was growing, taking on new meaning.
Alessandro was watching her, his beauty made harsh with the pain that radiated from him. Slowly, Alessandro lifted his hands, palms open, as if he was offering himself to her. His expression was stark. “Am I not enough?”
Ann-Sophie froze as the wordenoughtwisted yet again inside her, its sharpest edge finding its way straight to her own wound, the one that had never gone away. Alessandro’s question was so raw, so full of honesty. So full of the same unhealed hurt she had been running from. He wasn’t hiding it anymore, and somehow it made the devastation of his decision even worse.
“Youareenough,” she said as desperation spread its tendrils through her. “I saw what happened when your parents provoked you, and I’m not scared. I want to be there for you, the way you were there for me through this birth. But you’re pushing me away when we both need more. We can be so much more for each other. Youhaveto know that.”
He lowered his hands but said nothing. She searched his expression for some sign that her message was getting through to him, but all she found was a haunted emptiness in his eyes. And in that moment, she could feel the future of the path they were on taking shape. They would break each other’s hearts, over and over again, if she compromised.
Ann-Sophie swallowed, trying to ignore the lump in her throat. “I can’t do this halfway. If you cannot commit to this—to us—then everything between us is over.”
He kissed the baby on the forehead and stroked his cheek with a gentleness that took her breath away, and then he walked out the door.
Alessandro stormed through the front door of the villa, determined not to let his unruly emotions get the better of him for the second time today. He was angry at himself. He was frustrated with Ann-Sophie for stubbornly refusing to understand the reality of their situation. And he was overwhelmed by this tide of fear and intimacy and joy that had flowed at the birth of his son and then seemed to drain from him the moment he had walked away. But he had no other choice.
Alessandro gritted his teeth and reined in that out-of-control feeling inside him. Hewould notlash out again. This was straight out of his mother’s playbook, and he would not be like his mother. Not at any price. How could Ann-Sophie be sympathetic after the cruelty that had slipped out of his mouth before he had gotten a chance to think better of it? He didn’t deserve sympathy. He had failed himself and he had failed to protect her. And yet, she told him that she loved him.
“Hormones,” he muttered to himself as he walked up the stairs.
Yet she had looked at him with a seriousness that he couldn’t dismiss so easily. Maybe he should send Catarina to bring her belongings, as she and Ann-Sophie seemed to have bonded at the wedding. Or maybe he should call her mother again. Because if he saw Ann-Sophie and the baby again when he was so wracked with…emotions, he wouldn’t be able to leave.
Alessandro reached the top of the familiar staircase and turned toward the master bedroom, where he and Ann-Sophie had spent one magical night together. Until his parents spread their poison through the house. Alessandro frowned. His stomach clenched as he thought of their tiny baby, so helpless. Alessandro had wanted to take that baby and run as far away from his parents as he could get. But that was the heart of the problem, wasn’t it? He had been running for his entire adult life, and he still could not escape his parents, not when they were so deeply embedded in him. It was why he had to separate himself from Ann-Sophie and the baby.
But he refused to play that last heartbreaking scene over in his head again, so instead he focused on the tasks in front of him. But as he turned the corner, toward the master bedroom, he came to a stop at an open door. The door to his own childhood bedroom.
He stood at the threshold and peered inside it. Who had been in there? Certainly not his parents. They had rarely entered the room, even when he slept there as a child. He stepped inside, this forgotten relic of his past. On the walls were posters of football greats, now long-retired, and on the bookshelf was a collection of cars of all sizes, hiding the few books, their spines unbroken, given to him before the family had given up on his reading.
He had avoided this room, not wanting to go back to the time when his parents had so much more influence on his life. But as he wandered inside, a different set of memories floated through his mind. They transported him back to a time when he felt a strange kind of peace. A time before he was always angry at his parents, back when he was glad when they would disappear and leave him and Massimo with Olivia and her sister, Natalia, who were so good at allowing the twins to simply be themselves. They swam and kicked the football and wandered into the town for bakery treats, climbing scraggly olive trees along the way. Alessandro hadn’t come back here, not wanting to kick the hornet’s nest of childhood memories, but as he looked around, he remembered a kind of freedom. A time when his negligent parents had not steered his life.
The real question is what you will choose to do now.Ann-Sophie’s voice came back to him, as if she had been there, next to him all along. Alessandro heard footsteps in the hallway and turned, hoping that somehow she would appear. But it wasn’t Ann-Sophie that walked into his bedroom. It was Massimo.
