Page 105 of The Ache That Stayed

I needed this entire week to end. This project. This place. This… chaos. I wanted to go back to my life. Back to stability. Predictability. Back to Marcello. To my children. To the version of me that made sense. A reality that didn’t feel like it was slipping through my fingers every time I looked at Santino.

Because what was this? Between Santino and me? What had we crossed into?

My thoughts shifted, uninvited.

Would he leave again after all this?

The question hit harder than I expected. Would he just walk away? Like he had before?

He said he wouldn’t. But how could I trust that?

How could I trust him again?

My chest tightened again—deeper this time, heavier, like an instinct inside me knew the answer and didn’t like it. Because the truth was, even if he stayed, our dynamic had already changed into something we couldn’t undo.

The kiss.

It lingered there—unspoken, unresolved, like a blade suspended above us, waiting to fall.

Every time our eyes met, it would be sitting between us, making it impossible to pretend. There was no going back to before. Not after that.

Now, before was a myth. It burned the second his mouth touched mine.

My fingers curled into my palms. Because a part of me, the part I didn’t want to look at too closely—wasn’t afraid of him leaving. It was afraid he wouldn’t.

“Ready?”

His voice cut through the haze. I blinked, the thoughts shattering mid-fall, like I’d been pulled out of a place I shouldn’t have gone that deep into.

“Yeah,” I said quickly, not looking at him, unsure what he’d see if I did.

The air outside was colder now, the storm dissolving into a steady drizzle while the heavy sky hung low, refusing to let go completely. As my gaze drifted over the parking lot, I stalled. A familiar black SUV sat idling across the road.

A strange flicker of recognition brushed my mind—had I seen it near the cottage, or back at the site? I frowned, instantly talking myself down. There was no way. I was just imagining things because my brain was running on overdrive, looking for patterns where there weren’t any.

I looked away, wrapping my arms around myself as we walked toward the car, the damp air clinging to my skin.

Everything felt wrong. Slightly off. Like the world had shifted a few degrees and I was the only one who noticed.

Reality frayed at the edges, and everything was being pulled apart. Everything I’d spent years keeping buried was rising at once.

The kiss. My uncle. The nightmare. The questions I didn’t want to ask.

And standing in the middle of all of it was Santino. And worse of all, I no longer knew which thing I was afraid of losing.

Or which one would destroy me first.

CHAPTER 28

Santino

Four days.

It had been four days since the kiss—and two since the motel, when she’d curled into me like it was the most natural thing in the world. As if she’d done it a hundred times before and that was how we were always supposed to wake up.

And every hour since has been a slow bleed into reality.

I barely slept after what happened that night. Staying vigilant, she might slip into wherever she had gone. I kept waiting for her breath to hitch, for her body to jolt, for the nightmare to drag her under again.