Page 29 of Broken Trust

“This is Rosa,” Dante says softly.

Rosa kicks her feet and lets out a squeal, and then she leans toward me, arms out, like she's decided I'm worth investigating.

“Hi, Rosa,” I whisper. My voice doesn't sound like mine.

I reach out before I can stop myself. She grabs my finger in her hot little fist and holds on hard, and then she giggles, a big gummy grin that shows off four tiny teeth.

My chest is too tight to breathe. All I can do is stand there and let her hold on.

“She's usually shy with new people,” Dante says.

“I'm her aunt.” It comes out before I can stop it.

Something moves across his face, and he looks away quickly and clears his throat.

Nella's phone buzzes in her jacket pocket. She glances at the screen and swears under her breath. “It's the ward. I have to take this.” She points at Dante as she heads out. “Five minutes. Then you're gone.”

The bell jingles behind her, and suddenly it's just the three of us, left in the plaster dust with the radio murmuring in the background.

Dante sets the box down on the sawhorse, then the diaper bag beside it, and shifts Rosa higher. He looks around the room, at the brick and the tiles and the cables dangling overhead, and whistles low, like he can't quite believe what he's seeing.

“It's going to be something special, Gia,” he says. “I mean it.”

Why did he just turn up like this?

As much as my heart is melting seeing her, I don’t need this type of distraction right now.

“You have some nerve just showing up like this…”

Then, Rosa tugs at his collar and babbles something to herself. Neither of us looks away from the other.

“There's one thing that's bothered me since you got caught,” I say.

I take a deep breath. Because that's the part I can't get past, the part that keeps me awake at night even now. He got caught. If I hadn't heard him say her name in the dark that night, we'd still be living in that house on the hill like one big happy family, and every day of it would be a lie.

“If I could have had children,” I ask him, “would you still have done what you did with Mia?”

His eyes slide away from mine toward the glass. His mouth opens, and I want to stop him, to put my hand up and tell him I don't need to know, because I already know that whatever he's about to say will cut like a fucking knife.

“Maybe.” He lifts one shoulder, and the shrug is so small and so honest that it's worse than any lie. “I don't know what I was thinking back then. But that doesn't mean it isn't on my mind all the time. I know one thing for sure, though.” He swallows. “You not being able to have kids changed us, that’s a fact. There’s no denying it. But that doesn’t mean what I did was right.” He chokes. “Far from it.”

I wish I could tell him that isn't true.

“S-E-X turned into part of a routine,” he goes on quietly. “Calendars and temperatures and injections. Trying for a baby instead of wanting each other. And then, when it couldn't happen, when it kept not happening…” He stops and starts again. “It hurt me more than you. If that makes any sense.”

“It doesn't.”

“I couldn't give you the one thing you craved so badly.” His voice cracks. “Every month I watched you come out of that bathroom with another test in your hand, and it was my failure too. I couldn't fix it. So I stopped really seeing you, because it hurt too much.”

I cross my arms tight over my chest, as if that could hold everything in. “And what did you want, Dante? Did you ever really want to be a father?”

He gazes down at his daughter, and his whole face changes. It softens, and opens, and something in it lights up that I haven't seen in years.

“Not until I saw her,” he says. “I didn't realize how much I wanted it until she was lying on my chest.”

Jealousy crashes over me, so hard and so hot that I have to grip the sawhorse.

He got what I prayed for every night for three long years. He gets to be the parent I desired to be.