But now. Now that I was gone, now that the annulment agreement lay where I used to sleep, the truth struck him like a blow he couldn't dodge. Somewhere in those five years of waking beside me and falling asleep near me, he had fallen in love with me without ever knowing it. That love had been buried beneath his obsessions and selfishness, shackled by his identity and his so-called responsibilities. It took losing me for him to see it.
Years in Sicily's cutthroat business world had taught him to bury every emotion, to armor himself in ice and calculation. Yet somehow, in the quiet, unremarkable moments with me, his heart had betrayed him. He had fallen for the daughter of the very woman he'd destroyed. He had fallen for the woman he himself had dragged into hell.