This was about her. This was about the two of them, Anais and Dario. This was about six years ago, and this was about New York, and she didn’t know if she had it in her to survive this.
Dario came back out on the porch, holding a thick sheaf of papers in his hand. He moved around to the opposite side of the table from where Anais was standing, and he met her gaze over the dancing flames of the fire between them.
“My father was a ruined man,” he said.
He tilted the sheaf of papers he held so she could see them, and Anais caught her breath. It was the divorce papers. He’d brought them here.
Dario peeled the first page off, held it aloft, then fed it to the flames. “He was addicted to everything. You know this. He and my mother were as raucous and wild as yours were furious and brooding. I don’t know that they ever loved anything. Not each other, not us.” He watched her as he added another page to the fire. “After they died, my grandfather took us in, but he was not precisely a warm man. As he grew older, the stories he told were affectionate, interesting and never about us. They were always of other places, lost friends, misplaced trinkets. He was always somewhere else, even when he was in the same room.”
“You don’t have to tell me this,” she whispered, surprised to find she’d shifted to hold herself at some point, her arms wrapped around her middle. “I know your family story.”
“All I had was Dante,” Dario said, as if he hadn’t heard her. “He was my twin, my brother, my best friend. Truly, the first person I ever loved. I would have done anything for him. I did. And there were things that came between us before you, cracks in our relationship, but no one else I loved.”
That word. Loved. She realized he’d never told her he loved her. She’d accepted that she’d loved him back then, but she’d never have dared to say so. That wasn’t their agreement. That broke all the rules. Hearing that word in his mouth now made something inside her flutter. As if, were she not very careful, it might spread out its wings and start to fly away.
“And then you,” Dario said quietly, as if he knew. “I looked up, and there you were, and nothing was ever the same after that.”
Anais held herself tighter, all of her attention—all of herself—focused squarely on Dario, just there on the other side of the small fire, burning page after page of those awful papers as he spoke.
“I spent some time with Dante the other day,” he told her.
There was no holding back those wings inside her then. They unfurled. They started to beat. And something inside her soared.
“Then you know.” She felt the wetness on her face, but did nothing to stop the tears. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t look away from him. “You know I never betrayed you. I didn’t. He didn’t.”
“No,” Dario agreed, and there was sheer torment in his voice, his eyes. “I betrayed you. I was so ready to believe the worst. I was so lost back then, stressed out and overwhelmed, and maybe I wanted a terrible fight so I could control something, anything that was happening to me. I walked away from the only two people I’ve ever loved. I told myself cutting you both off was a victory, that it was an act of strength in the face of what you’d done to me. But I understand now it was the worst kind of cowardice.”
“Dario...” she whispered.
“Dante and I were twin brothers, the two of us against the world. We had our own language, our own universe. I never learned how to work at things. I never had to learn. I w
as raised by a man who ignored the present all around him, the better to drift off into the past. And my parents dealt with their problems by courting oblivion by any means necessary. Up their noses, down their throats, whatever worked.”
He threw another set of pages on the fire and the breeze blew the smoke in her face, sharp and rough at once. Anais didn’t turn away.
“My parents were no better,” she told him. “They taught me I deserved cruelty. That I was worth nothing.”
“I know,” Dario gritted out. “And I will never forgive myself for sending you the same message, all because I was too much of a coward to tell you the truth. I didn’t marry you because it was good business. I didn’t do it out of the goodness of my heart, because you needed immigration help or because I thought an in-house lawyer would be a great idea. I married you because I fell in love with you the moment I saw you, and it scared the hell out of me.”
Anais couldn’t see then. Tears streamed down her face, mixing with the fire and the smoke and the thick Hawaiian night. Somehow forming a kind of paste that wrapped itself around her broken heart and made it feel whole again.
Making her imagine. Making her hope.
“I knew Damian was mine the moment I saw that photograph,” Dario continued, his voice rougher than before, his gestures jerkier as he kept throwing page after page into the fire. “But more than that, I knew you. I knew you’d never throw it in my face like that if there’d ever been the slightest bit of doubt. I didn’t want to know these things. I pretended I didn’t know them. But I did.”
He held up the last page, with both of their signatures, both bold scrawls of blue. He waited while she wiped at her eyes, her face. He waited until she met his gaze again.
“Anais,” he said, “I love you. I’ve never loved another woman and I never will. I don’t want to pretend anymore.”
Then he set their divorce on fire. He held the paper for another moment, then let it go.
And then there was nothing but flames, and smoke, and love.
Their twisted, stubborn, fierce love that nothing had managed to destroy. Not betrayal. Not distance. Not her own better judgment. Not his vast wealth and ability to pretend she didn’t exist. Nothing.
Here they still were, all these years later. No matter who walked away, the other one always opened the door. Eventually.
“Listen to me,” he said urgently.