Page 146 of Beautiful Ruins
I had outgrown it.
And now the rest of my life was waiting.
Right here.
With him.
40
Epilogue - Raze
Izzy had kicked half the blankets off sometime during the night, one arm folded beneath the pillow, her hair fanned across the sheets like a dark halo.The faint light from the balcony doors painted soft lines across her face, catching the curve of her cheek and the slow rise and fall of her chest.
And my hand rested over her stomach.
Even now, months into the pregnancy, I still did it without thinking.A habit that had become instinct.Like some primitive part of my brain had decided the safest place for my hand to exist was right there—guarding the small life growing beneath her skin.
My child.
The word still hit me with a strange mixture of awe and dread every time it surfaced.
Because there had been another life once.
Another woman.Another child that never made it into this world.
The memory didn’t come as often as it used to, but when it did, it hit like a punch to the ribs.
Sometimes it arrived in fragments.The smell of burning.The smell of something lost forever.
Sometimes it came as something worse.
Possibility.
What that life might have looked like if fate hadn’t taken it from me before it had a chance to begin.
I had loved my first wife.
Unwaveringly.In that simple way men do when they believe the future is something solid they can hold in their hands.
And then she was gone.
Both of them were gone.
And the world had taught me a brutal lesson that day.
Nothing is guaranteed or safe.And that nothing lasts unless you fight like hell to keep it.
Which explained why I had become… difficult.
That was the polite word Tone liked to use.
Obsessive was probably more accurate.
Izzy couldn’t leave the estate without two cars shadowing her.
She had security at art school.Security at the grocery store.Security watching the street outside the café she liked near the harbor.
She complained about it often.Said I was suffocating her.Said I was turning her into a prisoner.She wasn’t entirely wrong.But I wasn’t changing it.Not after everything I had already lost.
