And he followed right behind her, her name on his lips all the while, as if those long six years had never happened.
* * *
Dario knew Anais wasn’t in the bed when he woke up the next morning.
He knew it in the same instant he opened his eyes and blinked in the morning sunlight, long before he turned his head to see the wide mattress as empty as it always was. As if her presence here last night, her body tucked against his as they’d finally drifted off to sleep together, had been nothing but a dream.
If it was a dream, he’d have stayed in it awhile longer. He’d have made it last, made it count.
But he knew he hadn’t dreamed a single second of it.
He swung out of the bed, pulling on the nearest pair of trousers he could find and leaving them low on his hips. He pushed his way out of the master suite to find the penthouse oddly, strangely, quiet all around him. The door to Anais’s bedroom was wide open, showing him it was empty, so he jogged down the wide steel stairs that brought him to the second level. It took him a moment to realize that he couldn’t hear Damian. Normally there’d be the usual clamor and howl of a young boy in the house, but not today. That was why it was so quiet.
The nanny must have taken him out, he thought absently, poking his head into one of the small reception rooms on the second level, the one Anais had claimed as her office while she’d been here. It, too, was empty. Not even her laptop open on the small, elegant desk in the corner.
Dario made his way down to the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee, then took it into his home office. The penthouse was still oppressively silent all around him, and there was a certain agitated sort of sensation brewing beneath his ribs. He couldn’t quite identify it. He rounded his desk and sat down, frowning at the large brown file folder that hadn’t been there last night, he was certain.
He picked it up and glanced inside...
And then everything seemed to turn to sheets of ice. Freeze solid, then shatter.
He understood in an instant that what had been bothering him wasn’t the absence of Anais’s laptop in that second-level room, but of everything else. The stacks of documents, the soft-sided briefcase she’d kept at her feet, the tangle of power cords. Or the suitcase that had sat at the foot of her bed in that bedroom across from his.
He should have realized at a glance that it wasn’t her laptop that was gone. She was.
Because he recognized the document in the file folder. It was the stack of divorce papers he’d left for her in his hotel room on Maui.
A dark, terrible thing was unfurling in him, deep and wide and thick, but he made himself flip through the papers to see if she’d signed it. She had. Of course she had. Her signature was just as he recalled it, somehow perfectly French and perfectly her at once, and he thought a bullet to the chest might have been easier. Better, maybe.
He heard a sound at the door and he looked up, somehow unsurprised to see her standing there, dressed head to toe in what he knew, now, were her lawyer clothes. Cool and gorgeous and sleek.
Her armor.
He didn’t beat around the bush. “Why?”
Something moved over her face, too quick for him to categorize it.
“You don’t trust me,” she said simply. “You’ll never trust me.”
“This can’t possibly—”
“Dario.”
He stopped, though he thought it might have broken something inside him. He didn’t know how there could be anything left to break.
“I can’t live like that,” Anais told him, that same raw thing he’d seen in her gaze last night there again, and in her voice besides. “I grew up in a house of hatred and contempt. Terrible accusations were thrown about like they were nothing. I won’t raise my son that way, surrounded by suspicion and fury at every turn.”
Dario was reeling. Unmoored and untethered, and he remembered this feeling all too well from six years ago. The sick thud in his stomach. The noise in his head.
The great black pit of loss that yawned open beneath him and wanted to swallow him whole.
Last time, he’d let it. He’d jumped right in. He’d stayed there for years and called it realism. He couldn’t bear the thought of sinking into it again. He couldn’t imagine there was any way out a second time.
“And last night? What the hell was that?”
“I wanted to say goodbye,” she said, and her cool tone slipped a bit. He heard the rawness. The pain. And it didn’t make him feel any kind of triumph. It was no victory. It only made him hurt. “I didn’t want to walk out on you.”
The way he had, without a second thought or a backward glance. She didn’t say that. She didn’t have to say it.
Dario rose then. He didn’t know what he meant to do. If anything.
“Don’t do this.” He wanted to sound fierce, sure. Instead, he sounded broken. Maybe, this time, he really was. Or maybe that was the point she was making—that he had been all along. “Don’t. What do I have to do to keep you here? Name it.”
But Anais’s expression didn’t change. If anything, she looked sadder and more resolute at the same time. And he had the strangest sense of foreboding as she opened her mouth.
“Talk to your brother,” she said softly. “That’s what you have to do for me to stay.”
“No.” He gritted the word out, every part of him tense and furious and still reeling closer and closer to that great black pit. “Why would you ask such a thing? Did my grandfather put you up to this?”
And he saw the way her face crumpled, just slightly, before she blinked it away. He saw the way she clenched her hands into fists at her sides. He saw that terrible sadness in her eyes.
“The fact that you don’t know is why I’m leaving.” She waved a hand, taking in the room, the city, maybe. Him. “This only works if we pretend the past never happened. If you make an effort to act as if it never happened.”
He didn’t understand this at all. “I’d think that’s a good thing, considering.”
“Dare.” That nickname only she had ever used, but in that hard, hurt voice, and it was worse than a kick to the gut. “I won’t live my life as a hostage to a history that you’ve been getting wrong for six years. How can we ever move forward if you can’t look at the past and see the truth?”
“This has nothing to do with that.”
“There is no this without that,” she corrected him. “Because that never happened. I don’t need your forgiveness and I refuse to spend my life trying to convince you to trust me when I never broke your trust in the first place. You know what my parents were like. The screaming fights, the ugly names, the endless horror of it. I won’t raise Damian like that. I don’t want him to think that kind of war is love.”
“It’s not like that.
