Page 192 of Matteo

I finally sit down. “Always digging into my past, asking questions, making assumptions.”

“No. No,” he insists, “that's not why I asked. I didn't make any assumptions. I was waiting for you to open up, and tell me.” He pauses and, seeing that he's got my attention, seems to choose every word carefully, like he doesn’t want to get anything wrong and mess up more than he already has. “I thought we had something special,” he says, gripping the table. “I thought you could tell me anything, that you felt comfortable enough to, because I never hid things from you. I found it easy to tell you about my fucked-up childhood, and I don't usually do that.”

He pauses and looks at me. “I thought it was the same for you.”

I school my expression to give nothing away.

“A-and … and that's what I wanted more than anything—for you to trust me enough to open up to me,” he says, sounding weary now, like the fight has gone out of him. “I wouldn't have judged you, Elizabeth. I would have listened, because I know that how we act and the things we do and say, they sometimes come from a pain so big, buried so deep inside us—because we want to forget it—but really, that pain makes us do things to protect us.”

He's gripping the table so hard his knuckles are white.

He wanted me to trust him. That's all he wanted, and I was busy protecting myself that I'd never considered what my silence was doing to him.

I flop back against my chair, my insides going slack. I’d been holding myself so tight, bracing myself for being in this room with him, but now he’s told me something I never even considered. He wasn't prying. He was asking out of curiosity.

He was hoping I’d trust him enough to tell him.

He opens his mouth to say something, but stops. I sense that he’s grappling with something he can't easily articulate.

“Say it,” I say. “Whatever’s on your mind, just say it. Don’t hold back.” My voice softens. “It's time we were honest with one another.”

He lets out a sigh, nodding. “I ... I thought my father was putting you up to something.”

“Your father?” I cry in disbelief.

“I wasn't sure what, but I had a feeling that maybe he had a hand in all this …”

I sit there in utter shock.

“Like I said,” he continues, “I don't trust that man to do the right thing by me. He hired you behind my back. He wanted an external consultant, he said, and then those few times when I saw you and him talking—”

“I explained why,” I cry, irritated. “I was doing a security audit for him!”

“I still didn’t trust the way he managed it all, hiring you, and not telling me. Asking you for constant updates. I was sure he was up to something, only, I didn't know what.” He sounds dejected, his head lowering to his chest. “For a while, I genuinely thought he might have found a way to drag you into this.”

“But why?” I’m not following his train of thought, and for a moment, I wonder if Matteo really has lost his mind.

“You don't know him, Elizabeth. You don't know what he's capable of. He did stuff like this with Rio and Raquel. He's not stupid. He knows you and I ...” He stops, stares at the tattoo on his wrist. “He knows,” he says, slowly, not looking at me, “that there was something going on between us.”

Was.

I breathe out slowly, considering this new possibility. .

“So you see my suspicion of you wasn't solely based on what Alex told me. It was also because of my father’s behaviour, him hiring you then having you working for me. I know it doesn't make sense ...”

But I think I'm starting to realize. And now I recall there were a few times when Matteo would ask me if I’d seen his father. His suspicions that something wasn’t quite right started way back then.

Paul would ask me to email him an update, or ask me to have a meeting in his office. I thought it was strange at the time, and I felt caught in a spiderweb of family drama. But now I'm starting to see that maybe Matteo's suspicion of me might have formed earlier. Alex framing me just played into it.

“I wish I could turn back the clock and do things differently,” Matteo says, his sad eyes burning into mine. “I wish I could make you see that I didn’t blindly accept Alex’s theory completely. There were other things. And then what I heard from your friends at the wedding, it confirmed that maybe I didn’t know you at all. I wish you’d been more open with me.”

I grit my teeth together, because looking back, I wish I had, too.

“It didn’t help that I was discovering things about you for the first time from your friends. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t asked you about Vlad before we left.”

The more he talks, the more I understand Matteo's actions. I press my hand across my neck, realizing that I have played a part in this mess. I’ve been feeling sorry for myself, and placing the blame squarely on him, but I should have been transparent, if not from the start, then at least after we became intimate.

“Okay,” I say, reluctantly, because the part of me I always kept hidden now has to see the light. “I … hid things … from you,” I say, slowly, afraid of what I’ll see when I look at him. I catch a flicker of curiosity in his eyes. “I ... own up, and I don’t feel good about it but ...” I stop, because this is harder than I thought, telling this man that I deliberately withheld things from him. I swallow, stare at the desk, at his pen and diary, and his phone, at anything but him. “I hid things about my past, about Vlad, about Takumi ...” I lift my gaze to his.