What if Elio can't change?
I'm worried about him. About what he's becoming. About the distance behind his eyes that gets wider every day. About the man I fell in love with disappearing inside the machine his father built and not finding his way back out.
I hate myself for that. And it changes nothing.
I need to leave.
Not eventually. Not when conditions improve, not when the right opportunity presents itself. Not after I've drawn up a plan with backup routes and contingencies and a strategy that the rational part of my brain is screaming for. The decision isn't rational. It isn't strategic. It doesn't account for the fact that I'm nine weeks pregnant and alone in Sicily, and the man I'm running from controls everything within a hundred miles and has the resources to find me anywhere on earth.
None of that matters.
I pick up the test. Wrap it in tissue from the cabinet under the sink. I should get rid of it. Flush it, bury it in the kitchen trash under coffee grounds, throw it over the garden wall intothe lemon grove. I know I should get rid of it. The smart move, the survival move, is to destroy the evidence and keep my mouth shut and let the secret live only in my body where no one can find it.
I slide it behind the drawer instead. Into the gap where the back panel meets the frame, the narrow space between wood and wall that you'd only find if you pulled the drawer all the way out and looked.
I need to escape.
23
VIOLET
You'd think a woman who's spent the last few days building an escape plan in her head would have the discipline to stay away. You'd think the fury and the grief and the image of Matt's throat being sliced in the morning light would be enough to keep her feet pointed in any direction that isn't towardhim. You'd think all of that, and you'd be right. But it doesn't matter, because here I am.
Walking toward Elio.
I lost the war. That's what this is. The war I've been fighting in Elena's room with my hand on my stomach and my face pressed into a pillow that doesn't smell like anything except absence. The war where one side says he killed Matt and the other side says I miss him so much I can barely think straight. I have been lying in that empty room for days, letting them tear me apart, and I am so goddamn tired of it. Especially knowing now what I have to do.
So I go back to him. Not because I've forgiven him. Not because the fury has burned down to something manageable. Not because the image of Matt on his knees has faded. It hasn't, it won't, it lives behind my eyelids every time I blink, and it will live there forever.
I go back because the other thing is also true.
I miss him. I miss him the way you miss breathing when you've been holding your breath for too long; that desperate, involuntary gasp when your body overrides your brain and says enough, you're done, we're doing this now whether you like it or not. I don't like it. In fact I hate it. I hate that I can carry this much rage in my chest and still want his arms around me. I hate that my body doesn't care about justice or betrayal.
Elio's in the study, his door wide open. He's standing by the window, not sitting, his back to me, one hand in his pocket and the other holding a glass of something amber. The afternoon light catches the side of his jaw and the line of his throat, making the butterflies take off in my stomach just at the sight of him. Love and fury and grief warring inside me all at the same time.
When he turns I nearly gasp. Because at the sight of me his face opens. The mask he usually wears, the one made of marble, money, and the kind of control you learn when your father teaches you that feelings are liabilities, just drops. For one second, maybe two, he is looking at me the way a man looks at something he thought was gone forever.
Then he catches himself. Puts it back on. But not fast enough.
I cross the room without thinking. My feet are in charge today and the rest of me is just along for the ride, apparently, because I walk straight to him and put my arms around his waist and press my face into his chest as I say the truest, most devastating thing I could possibly say.
"I missed you." I mean it. God help me, I mean it with every cell in my body.
His body goes still as he takes one breath. Two. Then his arms come around me and his whole frame exhales. Not a sigh. Something deeper, different. I feel the tension leave his body, the tension I put there. I want to tell him I'm sorry, tell him that everything is okay now, but that would be a lie. The tension thatjust left him? It just made space for something worse. I know this and I'm standing in his arms anyway because I can't...
I can't be anywhere else right now.
His hand moves up my spine. Palm flat, fingers spread. The same hand that held the knife. The same hand that plays haunting piano music when he thinks no one is listening. The same hand that cradled my head in the compound when he carried me out. All the same hand. All the same man. I have been trying to make him two different people for days and I cannot do it. Every version of him is touching me at once as I stand here with my face against his shirt, his cologne in my lungs, and his heartbeat under my cheek.
"Violet." Just my name. Just one word. But his voice cracks on it, right down the center.
I don't say anything else. Neither does he. We just stand there. In his study. In the late afternoon light. His hand on my back. My arms around his waist. His chin on top of my head.
It is the best and worst I've felt in weeks. Simultaneously.
When we finally break apart I don't leave his side, needing his proximity despite wanting the distance.
Through the afternoon, into the early evening, my eyes follow him the way they used to in the first weeks after the rescue. Memorizing everything I can about him. Except then I was rebuilding him from the memory I'd worn thin in captivity. Now I'm storing him for a different kind of absence.
