Her Little White Lie (21 page)

“Is that all?” she asked, searching his face, demanding honesty.

He gritted his teeth and looked away. “It’s all I have to give.”

“You’re a liar, Dante.”

Anger flooded through him, unreasonable and hot. “I’m a what?”

“A liar. And not just about this. Your entire life is a lie. Your whole existence.”

He pushed up from his chair and she leaped backward, her eyes wide with shock. “Of course,” he snarled, battling against the pain in his chest. “How could I forget? I’m the Italian bastard, adopted by a respectable family. The one who doesn’t belong. Of course my existence is a lie. I have spent years pretending to be civilized, pretending to be a man of honor, when we both know I am not. I don’t share their blood,” he said, speaking of his parents. “I have the blood of a killer in me. The blood of a low-class, violent coward who abused women. Killed them. That’s who I am … of course this is a lie,” he said, sweeping his hand around the well-ordered, perfect room. The lie he had built for himself.

He stared her down, stared into her wide eyes, waiting for the fear to win. Waiting for her to realize that what he said was true. That he wasn’t the man she thought he was. That he wasn’t the man he pretended to be. That beneath his armor, was a darkness that no one would ever want to touch.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You idiot. You think I don’t know that’s what you think of yourself? You think I buy what the press writes? What you show everyone? Don’t forget I’m the one who dragged you out of that cold shower. I’m the one who warmed you with her own body, so don’t try to scare me now with the same lie you tell yourself every day.
Because this is the lie, Dante Romani. That you’re broken. That you can’t love or be loved. Look around you … people love you. Because you’re worthy of it. Don and Mary love you. Ana loves you. I love you. And you won’t let us. Because you’re too damn afraid.”

“Hell, yes, I’m afraid,” he growled, feeling the walls he’d erected around his heart crumbling. “I am half of that man, Paige. Do you know what that means? Passion is poison for me. It could be.”

“It’s not true.”

“You think it’s not true. Why? Because you love me?
She
loved him, Paige.” He shouted the words, desperate to make her understand, to make her believe him. “That’s why she didn’t leave. She loved him … she thought he could be different. That he could change. Don’t you understand? Love doesn’t fix anything. It hides flaws. Makes people blind to them. But love is not all brightness and sunshine. It can’t heal a damned thing.” His voice broke, the memories of his mother flooding his mind. “It has a dark side. Everything does.”

She shook her head. “Only if you choose to dwell in the dark. He made a choice, Dante. You can’t blame love for that. That wasn’t love.”

“Passion then. Emotion. A lack of control. I won’t let myself do that. Do you see this?” he asked, sweeping his arm across his office. “Order. Control. That’s who I am. It’s what I’ve made myself. What I’ve trained myself to be. So that I will never hurt someone like that. So that I will never become that man.”

“So that you’ll never be hurt,” she said, her voice soft.

“That, too,” he said, everything in him feeling exposed now. Raw.

“This isn’t real,” she said, looking around the room. “It’s just stuff. It’s just the outside. It doesn’t fix who you are.”

He laughed, the sound divorced from humor. “Nothing can, I’m afraid. All I can do is keep hiding who I am. Keep it locked up.”

She bit her lip and shook her head. “You’re a good man, Dante. I don’t know why you don’t know it. Why you don’t believe it. Look what you’ve done for me. For Ana. You keep almost every bit of yourself locked up tight and you make me work to reach it, but when I do, that’s when I know.”

“When you know what?” he asked, his lungs frozen, incapable of drawing breath.

“When I know that I love you. And not just that, but why. Because you are so strong. And so broken. And yet, in spite of everything you’ve been through, you’ve grown up to be a good man. A man who puts the needs of others before himself. A man who is capable of great love, if only he would let himself feel it.”

He shook his head. “That’s not me, Paige. I’m sorry you’re confused about that.”

“You love me,” she said.

Something inside of him broke completely, opening up a flood of emotion, of need so strong he wasn’t sure he could withstand the onslaught. But he stood still, composing his face into a mask, doing what he had to do.

“No.”

She shook her head. “I don’t believe that.”

“Then you have fooled yourself.”

A tear spilled down her cheek, then another, each track of moisture a stab in his chest, a drop of his own blood shed inside, bleeding him dry. She shook her head. “No, Dante. Stop now. How long will you punish yourself for sins your father committed?”

“Love only means one thing to me, Paige. It is rage, and loss and grief so deep it consumes everything in its path. It puts you on your knees, steals your breath with the pain that it causes.”

“That isn’t love, Dante. That’s evil. It was evil that tore love from you, that made your father do what he did. There was no love in it.”

“Then it’s the potential for evil I see in myself. Thank you for making it clear.”

“You say you’re half of your father like that makes everything certain. Like you aren’t half of your mother. Don’t forget that. Don’t forget she gave you life, and that she would want you to live it fully. And don’t forget what Don and Mary gave you, not through genetics, but what they taught you. You’re bigger than one man, bigger than one event.”

“And you speak like you have anything more than frivolous thoughts in your head,” he growled, hating the insult, hating the words even as they left his lips. He was a coward. And in that moment, he knew it. Knew he was using anger to make her leave so he wouldn’t have to listen to her anymore.

Because she was too close to tearing the veil away. To exposing him, not just to her, but to himself, for the first time.

“Out,” he said. “Get out.”

She stood for a moment, her blue eyes fixed on his, windows into her soul. Her pain, her sadness, worst of all, her love. For him. Love he didn’t deserve. Couldn’t accept.

“Get out, Paige. I don’t want you here. I don’t want you.” The last words were torn from him, taking a piece of his soul with them. A lie he had to tell. A lie he hated.

She bit her bottom lip and nodded, then turned and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her. He didn’t want to follow her. He didn’t want to watch her walk out of the house, drive away. Out of his life. He would deserve it. He should want it.

But he didn’t. He so desperately didn’t. He wanted to cling to her words. To tell her that she was right. To will himself to believe it no matter what. So he could have her. So he could have Ana.

He looked around his desk, it was well-ordered. So perfect. And for the first time, he realized that everything around him was a lie. He was broken. Disheveled. Destroyed. And no amount of cleaning his surroundings would fix it.

He put his hand on his desk, on top of a mug that was
placed at a right angle, in the exact spot it needed to be for him to reach it with ease when he was seated. He picked it up by the handle and looked at it, felt the weight of it in his hand.

And he looked back down at the surface of his desk. A place for everything, everything in its place. And he hated it.

He growled and hurled the mug at the wall, splintering it into a hundred pieces. He braced himself on the desk, then he pushed everything to the floor.

His pencil holder. Stapler. The lamp. The damn zen garden that was supposed to make him feel calm. A stack of papers. Until his office was littered with the kind of destruction that mirrored the man he was within.

Piece by piece, he exposed himself. Tore away the walls. Tore away the facade until he had to look at it. Until he had to look at himself.

Pain tore at his chest. For once, he didn’t have to strike out to cause physical agony as punishment. It was all in him, burning him alive from the inside out. He dropped to his knees, leaned forward, his forehead and forearms touching the floor.

She was right. He was a liar. He was scared, of himself. But not only of that, of caring and losing again. So much so, he had spent his life training himself never to care, on the excuse that he was protecting everyone from himself.

When he was really protecting himself from everyone else. Still a scared child, hiding behind a sofa, waiting, waiting for the monster to find him. A monster from outside, or a monster inside of himself.

He had believed, wholly, that he had banished his every emotion. But it was a lie, too. He hadn’t. He had simply embraced fear and allowed it to dictate everything he did. Who he was.

For a brief moment in time, he’d had love in this house. A woman who loved him. A child who trusted him completely.

And he had thrown it away. The final punishment for his sins. The ultimate penance. He had fallen in love. The thing
he had sworn he must never do. And he had done it. So he had pushed her away, pushed them away.

And now he was reduced to nothing. Raw and bleeding, all of his protection gone. All of his defenses, his ways of dealing, exposed for the flimsy nothings they were. He could do nothing. Nothing but lie there and embrace the pain, the love, the misery, the loss. Not just for Paige, not just for Ana, but for every moment in his life.

The walls he’d built to protect himself burned to nothing, reduced to ash before his eyes. He was not the man he pretended to be. He was not the man the media thought he was. And he let himself hope, for a moment, that he was the man that Paige saw. A man worthy of her love, worthy of Ana’s admiration. Worthy of the Colsons’ adoption.

For a long time he lay there, stripped of his protection. Of everything. Anguish washing over him, beating against him.

Finally, he stood, his hands shaking, and dialed his mother and father’s phone number.

“Dante?” His mother answered on the second ring.

“Why did you adopt me?” he asked. He had never asked. He had always feared the answer. Had always feared that the media was right. And over the years, he had simply started to assume they were.

More than that, he was afraid of loving again. Of caring and losing. But that fear had carried him nowhere. That fear had nothing for him. Had given him nothing.

“Because,” she said, her tone simple, matter-of-fact, “we fell in love with you the moment we saw you. An angry teenage boy with so much potential, in so much need. We knew you were our son. The one we’d been waiting for.”

“I wasn’t ready to hear that,” he said, swallowing hard, holding the phone tight to his ear. “Until now.”

“I know,” she whispered.

He closed his eyes and released his hold on fear. “I love you,” he said.

P
AIGE
felt like she was dying. Ana hadn’t slept the whole night. She couldn’t really blame her. She was in her little bassinet, rather than her crib, and crammed back into Paige’s old room, in her old apartment. As a result, Paige hadn’t slept, either.

She’d thought coming back to her little apartment would give her some clarity. Make her feel more … more like Dante and everything else had never happened. But it hadn’t helped. She was too different. Too changed from her time with him. There was no way to even pretend it hadn’t happened.

Now she was sitting at her desk, after having weathered a sea of congratulations from the other employees on her way into the office, feeling like death and having just spent the night away from her new husband, who was probably never going to speak to her again.

She would have to go back to Dante’s house, she knew that. But one night couldn’t have hurt. No one would find out. It would hardly compromise the adoption. And she needed space. Needed to not be sharing the same air as Dante.

She knew that he’d lashed out because she’d challenged him. Because he was frightened. She knew it down in her soul. But just because she was right, didn’t mean he would change his mind. Didn’t mean he would decide to change a lifetime of thinking and feeling a certain way. Didn’t mean he even wanted to.

Maybe she was wrong about him loving her—that could be true. He loved Ana, though. She could see that. And she knew, given the chance, that he would be an amazing father. The kind of man who offered support and love to his children.

She’d known it the moment she’d seen him there, singing Ana his lullaby. She knew that had cost him, and that Ana’s needs had transcended his grief. She’d known in that moment that he was a man capable of great love. And that he’d let fear cripple him.

Stupid man. Stupid, fantastic, lovely man.

“Mrs. Romani?”

It took Paige a moment to realize she was being addressed, even though she was in her office. She looked up and saw a young man standing at the door, a newspaper in his hand.

“Yes?”

“I’m supposed to deliver this to you.” He came in and set the paper on her desk.

“Oh …” She looked down at her desk, frowning. “Oh … I … thank you …” She looked up and the man was gone.

She picked up the paper and started to turn each page, looking for … she didn’t know what. Had someone wanted her to see pictures of the wedding? She flipped to the style section, and the headline stopped her cold.

She put her hand over her mouth, a sob climbing her throat. She picked up the paper, gathered it close to her chest, stood and ran out of her office.

“Explain this,” Paige said, throwing the newspaper onto Dante’s desk, a tear rolling down her cheek. She was shaking. Everywhere.

Dante looked up at her, his eyes haunted, the veil well and truly dropped. There was no armor covering up his emotions, nothing protecting him. He was as bare and vulnerable as she was.

“I told the truth,” he said, his voice rough. “For the first time in so long, I told the truth.”

She read the headline out loud. “Recently Wed Dante Romani Proclaims: I Love My Wife.”

“It’s true,” he said.

Another tear slid down her cheek and she looked down at the paper, reading out loud.