But eventually, as she lay there, she started thinking about love.
Starting with her mother.
There had been something deeply healing in the conversation she’d had with Giaco earlier that night. It was as if he’d reached deep inside her and rearranged her bones—that was how catastrophically wonderful it had been. It was as if he’d made her new.
And it allowed her to think more critically about her childhood. About the lies her father had told her. All the things she’d believed about her mother and her death because he’d wanted her to believe them. Because it suited him, the sick and sadistic man that he was, to know that his daughter truly believed that she had essentially killed her own mother.
That she had been such a trial that her mother had seen no other way out.
Now it was like a boulder had been rolled away from that part of her heart. She felt nothing for her mother but sympathy. A deep sorrow. And after twenty-four years of Umberto’s company, understanding as to why she’d had to do what she’d done.
But she also knew—with a deep comprehension that seemed more like something primal within her—thatshecould not make the same choice. Not ever.
She thought about Pau’s shift into such coldness that she wasn’t entirely certain she didn’t have frostbite, no matter what had happened in that shower. The idea of a lifetime like that with him, stretching before her, was daunting.
They had agreed they would not divorce. They had talked about legacies.
He had been calm and distant then, but nothing like this. That had been a cool, refreshing breeze after a lifetime of Umberto’s rages. Tonight had been an ice storm, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever finish shivering. She was half afraid to check her own body, sure she’d find signs of hypothermia.
A lifetime in this kind of arctic chill could make all kinds of escape plans seem reasonable.
But she hugged herself tight as she lay there. She felt her baby kick in her belly, and it made her smile, and she knew with a bedrock certainty that she could never make the same choice her mother had.
That somehow, she would find a way to be neither diminished nor destroyed by this marriage. And that no matter how she felt about it, she would love her child more. Too much to ever leave by choice.
Maybe this was the strength that her mother had indicated to Giaco that Leontina had. Maybe it was a fierceness that her mother had lacked. Maybe the reason her mother hadn’t written about her was that she knew that she was leaving behind a daughter who would have to do better, or be crushed.
All things were possible, Leontina thought. She felt grateful for her mother and sorry she hadn’t known her better, the way her brother had.
“But I swear to you,” she whispered to the baby inside her, smoothing her hand over the little foot that kicked at her, “I promise you, as long as I live, I will love you so much that if thousands of vicious men like Umberto claimed that I didn’t love you, you would never believe them. They will never get purchase on your heart.I promise.”
When her son kicked inside her again, she felt as if they come to an agreement.
She closed her eyes then and thought instead of Pau. The man she loved.
Despite the fact that he was clearly suffering from some heretofore unknown head wound—because there could be no other explanation, surely, for him to react the way he had. Leontina was many things. Foolish, perhaps, in imagining that she in all her brash innocence could truly seduce a man like Pau, who had obviously been around every block there was to go around. No doubt a time or two. Or more.
But she thought that was the difference between book smart and street smart. Or sheet smart as the case might be in this situation. He’d had a lot to teach her in bed. She couldn’t deny that.
Yet when it came to emotions, she thought that Pau was actually the virgin here.
She thought of what her brother had told her—that Pau loved only his vines and his legacy, and nothing else.
But Giaco had never been all that great at emotion himself. Leontina knew this not only because of her brother’s much-publicized bad behavior all over the world’s sparkliest places, but because she had seen the difference in him now that he was with Ivy.
Leontina had never dared try to get close to her stepsister while Ivy had still lived in the castle. It had been too dangerous. Umberto viewed all hints of closeness as ammunition. As weakness. She’d followed Ivy’s life after she’d escaped the castle, so she knew the person her brother had married. Giaco was in no way the man he’d been before her.
The contrast was so profound that it could only be love.
She thought that in this case, having studied love more than either of them, she was the authority on this. She’d seen the look on his face when they’d been in his cousin’s clinic. She’d heard what his cousin said—that Pau was a changed man. She’d seen the look on his face tonight.
So as she lay there in the fetal position, cradling her baby, she asked herself what she would think of her dynamic with Pau if she wasn’t personally involved.
It wasn’t hard to reach a conclusion.
In Leontina’s expert opinion, her husband was completely in love with her, but terrified to admit that to himself. Much less to her.
She sat with that, waiting to see if it felt like maybe she was being a bit delusional. Or straight-up self-serving. Because, of course, that was what she would prefer the truth to be. She was in love with him already, so, of course, she’d love it if they matched.
