Page 5 of Broken Trust

Dante's weight lifts off the mattress, and I keep my eyes shut and my breathing slow and let him think I'm under.

I listen to him cross the room in the dark, careful, quiet, the way you move when you don't want to wake anything. The bathroom door pulls to. The lock eases down so it won't snap. The fan clicks on. And then his voice underneath it, low and even and going on way too long for a man who has nothing to say to me.

I fold the sheet back and put my bare feet on the cold boards one at a time, and I cross the floor as softly as he did, holding my breath, and I press my face to the gap at the hinge where the wood never quite meets the frame, and I listen to Dante talk to someone in the middle of the night.

The fan eats most of it. That's the only mercy I get, and it isn't one, because half a sentence is worse than the whole thing. It comes to me in pieces, in the gaps where he turns toward the door, and every piece is worse than the quiet around it.

never loved her the way she loves me.

My heart loud against the wood, but my feet stay planted. I don't move.

I listen to Dante hand the whole inside of our life to someone else. Flat. Tired. Like a man putting down something he's carried too far.

I back away from the door, not wanting to hear another word, hating myself for eavesdropping. He loves me. I know he does. Everyone goes through the ten-year itch, especially after everything we've been through. My family. His nonexistent career at the start of the marriage.

Everything in me wants to go through that door right now and make him say it to my face. But instead I hold back the tears and go back to bed. I turn on my side, my back to the bathroom door, and I cry myself to sleep, unable to ignore the words I heard.

If he doesn't love me, then why is he here?

Then again, that isn't what he said. He said he doesn't love me the way I love him.

I never noticed it until now. When he couldn't get a job and I went to work for my dad, he didn't flinch. He never said a man is supposed to provide for his family. If anything, he encouraged me to go. Didn't he know how much I put up with from my own family to keep him? Papa ran a background check. Mama tried to bribe him. I know, even though he never told me. My sister Nella told me. We fought so hard to get down that aisle, not knowing it would turn out to be the easy hurdle.

Now, as I lie here soaking the pillow with my tears, the realization hits me. Dante was never the man who truly saw me. He was just the man who settled, and his prize for settling was me.

4

DANTE

The next day I get up early. Gia is still sleeping like a log. I must have really worn her out last night. It works in my favor. I don't have to face her, or stand there and lie again about going to work when I'm really going to her sister's. The guilt sits heavy the whole drive over. There's only one thing I'm going there to end it with Mia.

She opens the door in the grey dressing gown Gia gave her two Christmases ago, and for half a second my body can't tell the two of them apart. But Gia has never once looked at me the way Mia does, like she wants to peel my clothes off the second she sees me, like she can't breathe without my skin against hers. That's lust. It isn't love. What Gia and I have, nothing can replace. I need to bring some of this into my own bedroom, treat Gia the way I treated her last night, because sex was never the thing that was missing. Respect and honesty were, and right now I'm short on both. Then the belly comes out of the shadow, and I'm staring at the lie itself. Most men would be glad to know the baby is theirs. When I look at Mia it only makes me sick, because ours wasn't made in a lab the way we told Gia. It's so much worse than that.

“You look terrible.” She leaves the door hanging open and turns back inside, deciding that's an invitation, so it is one. “Come in before you let all the heat out.”

“I'm not staying.” I keep my feet on the mat, the cold stairwell at my back. “I came to tell you to your face. It’s as if you didn’t hear me last night.”

She doesn't answer. She pads into the little kitchen, fills the kettle, drops the switch. I make myself look at the apartment instead of at her. Small, low-ceilinged, orange blossoms over something medicinal. Prenatal vitamins in a row on the counter. A scan photo on the fridge under a magnet shaped like a lemon. On the sill, the plant she can never keep alive leans brown-edged toward a window with nothing behind it. Somewhere in here is a drawer full of things for a baby I made in the wrong bed, and I can't look at that either.

“Mia.”

“You always say you're not staying.” She takes down two cups, though I haven't agreed to tea and never will. “And then you stay.”

I step in and pull the door shut behind me, because having this out with the whole building listening is worse than having it out at all, and the latch clicks like something closing on more than a stairwell.

“This is over. For real, and I need you to actually hear me this time, because I'm not doing it in pieces anymore.”

She sets the cups down without pouring. She doesn't cry and she doesn't fight. She lays a hand flat on the top of her belly and gives me a calm so patient it turns my stomach. I'd rather she threw a cup at my head than look at me like this, like a woman waiting out a tantrum.

“Sit down, Dante.”

“No.”

“You’re acting all nervous. You’re making me feel anxious.” She hooks a chair out from the table with her ankle, the exact way Gia does it, and it lands like a knife. “Sit before you fall down, say your speech, and I'll hear the whole thing. I always hear you out. It's the one thing she never does.”

I don't sit. I grip the back of the chair instead, because it's the only steady thing within reach.

“Last night I stood in my doorway wearing your perfume.” I take a deep breath choosing my words carefully. “Gia had lit the whole house. Cooked. Then, looked at me like I was worth the trouble, and I let her have me with you still on my skin. That's the man I am now. I can't walk into that house one more time carrying this. I won't.”