“I can get us fake passports.”
“Angelo, I want to stay.”
And it was true. I needed to stay here, despite everything, and perhaps even because of everything. My marriage was a sham, my father had disowned me, and my mother didn’t even have a say about what china we’d dine with, let alone the ability to help me.
Angelo had called several times and even showed up at my door once to see how I was doing, but Clara shooed him away. My father took two business trips and stayed at Mama’s Pizza for the majority of my visit so far, which surprised no one at all.
Mama and Clara were my near-constant companions. They fed and bathed me and told me that my husband would come to his senses and seek me out.
They said that the minute he learned I was pregnant, he would drop everything and beg for my forgiveness. But I knew Wolfe did not want to become a father. And coming forward and telling him about the pregnancy would mean crawling back to him. I had allowed him to stomp on my pride one too many times.
This time, he would have to come to me.
Not to get a kick out of it—but because I genuinely needed to know that he cared.
Three days after I left Wolfe’s mansion, Clara opened the door to my room and announced, “You have a visitor, little one.”
I jumped out of bed, feeling woozy, hopeful, and excited all at the same time. So he was here, after all. And he wanted to talk. That was a good sign, right? Unless he wanted to serve me with divorce papers. But, knowing Wolfe, he was the type to send someone else over to hand them to me. Once he truly cut you out of his life, he wouldn’t bother making the trip. Clara saw the light flicking on behind my eyes as I rushed toward the vanity mirror, slapping my cheeks to make myself look livelier and flushed, then applying a generous layer of lip gloss. She lowered her head, fiddling with her thumbs.
“It’s Ms. Sterling.”
“Oh.” I blinked, tossing the lip gloss aside and wiping my hands over my thighs. “How nice of her to stop by. Thank you, Clara.”
In the salon, Clara served us tea and pandoro. Ms. Sterling sat with her back straight, her pinky lifted in the air over her tea cup, and her lips pursed with barely restrained fury. I stared into my cup of tea, wishing she’d both talk and never open her mouth at the same time. What if she came to tell me Wolfe and I were over? She certainly didn’t look pleased.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I finally asked her when it became apparent that we could sit like this for long, soundless minutes.
“Because you’re a fool, and he is a complete idiot. Together, you make the perfect couple. Which begs the question—why are you here and he is there?” She slammed her tea cup on the table, causing the hot liquid to swoosh from side to side.
“Well, the obvious answer is because he hates me.” I picked invisible lint from my pajama pants. “And the secondary one is because he married me so he could ruin my father and everything he cares about.”
“I can’t sit and listen to this nonsense any longer. How could you be so dense?” She threw her arms in the air.
“How do you mean?”
“Wolfe never entertained himself with the idea of marriage and a wife. Not until he saw you for the first time. You were never in his plan. He never spoke of you. Barely even knew about your existence until he saw you. Which leads me to believe that his spontaneous decision had less to do about your father and more to do with the fact that he simply wanted you for himself and knew that courting you was out of the question. Since he had leverage on your father, he thought it would be a win-win scenario. But it wasn’t.” She shook her head. “You made things harder for him. Messier. He could have had your father locked in prison for life if it wasn’t for you. The minute you stepped into the picture—he wanted something of your father’s, and they both had things to bargain. You didn’t help Wolfe’s plan. You sabotaged it.”
“Wolfe is doing the best he can to ruin my father’s business.”
“But he is still out and about, is he not? Your father tried to assassinate him, and Wolfe still held his wedding in this house. The boy has had it bad for you from the moment he saw your face.”
I didn’t know whether I should laugh or cry. I’d seen Ms. Sterling going to extreme measures to try and patch things up between Wolfe and me, but this was stretching it, even by her standards.