Page 208 of Wrong Marriage. Right Groom
I couldn’t keep handing pieces of myself to a man whose heart was buried beside another woman.
And yet...
The moment I tried to resent him, something inside me resisted.
I should call Vincenzo for real.
Leave this place. Leave him. But the thought of walking away from Rafael and little Tess made something inside me splinter.
I wanted us to be a family—messy, flawed, and painfully real; I wanted warmth instead of distance, laughter instead of silence, and a love that burned with passion rather than leaving us stranded on opposite sides of a cold, endless grief.
But Zara still haunted him.
The woman who had given him a daughter. The ghost whose shadow I could never quite escape.
A shaky breath left me.
Maybe I had been approaching this all wrong.
Maybe the answer wasn’t demanding that he move on.
Maybe it wasn’t accusing him of loving a dead woman more than the living one standing in front of him.
Maybe the answer was understanding.
Listening.
Seeing the wounds beneath his anger the same way he had once seen mine beneath my blindness.
Because if I wanted him to understand my darkness...
Perhaps I had to understand his.
Even if doing so broke my heart.
Even if, in the end, he never loved me back.
Chapter 15
LORETTA
Ireached for my bag, the familiar motion grounding me as I slung it over my shoulder.
The weight of it felt small compared to everything else pressing down on me, but it was something I could control.
