“Yeah.”
Cassio exhales slowly, taking his glass from the bartender.
“Does Remo know?”
“He suspects.”
There’s a long pause and for the first time in my life I’m anxious to reach the end of it.
Cass turns to me and lowers his voice. “How deep are you?”
My back teeth grind. Again, I can’t lie to him, because unlike Remo, the walking anger management therapy case in point, Cass won’t judge.
I sink my face into my hands. “So fucking deep I can’t see.”
“Cazzo,” he murmurs.
I can feel him studying me. “What are you going to do?”
“Don’t know.”
I lift my head and rub fingertips into my eye sockets, already weary of the conversation.
“Do you want to… you know… be with her? Officially?”
His furrowed brow suggests ‘yes’ would not be the ideal answer. But itisthe truth, so I nod.
He shakes his head as if he just misheard. “But… what about?—"
“I don’t care anymore.” I say the words quietly but they still land like a fucking bomb.
Cassio’s jaw goes slack. “What?”
I huff out a breath, instantly feeling lighter. “I don’t care if she broke me.”
He turns his body to face me square.
“Are you serious?”
“I’ve been thinking about it.” I stare into the amber liquid inmy glass. “Everything I know now, about what she went through with her uncle…”
He falls quiet.
“She doesn’t remember what she did.” I say. “Nothing. That whole time in her life is fractured.”
“Trauma will do that,” he says, darkly. “It happened to me.”
I glance up. “What?”
He gestures toward me. “When you… retreated. There are things I don’t remember from that time. I blocked it out. Figured at the time I was partly to blame.”
My face contorts. “How could it have been your fault, Cass?”
“I was a kid,” he shrugs. “I saw what Father did to you and I didn’t step in to help. None of us did?—”
“Good!” I snap. “He would only have done the same to you.”
“Well, as a kid I blamed myself. And now there are huge chunks of memory I’ve tucked away in the back of my mind. Not on purpose. It just… happened.”
