To stop trying to be something she could never be.
But Riccardo’s relentless assault continued to unpeel her layers, as if once started it would never stop. Emotions that had been bottled up far too long bubbled over and tumbled into her consciousness. She remembered that perfect day before everything had unraveled, when they’d rescued their dog, Brooklyn, from the street, taken her to the house in Westchester and spent the weekend there. Her gorgeous husband had scooped up Brooklyn in one hand and Lilly in the other and tucked them all into bed. Throwing out the heart-stopping comment as the puppy lay snoring at their feet that maybe they should make theirs a family of four.
She’d been so excited, her mind whirring like the hamster’s wheel from her childhood, that she hadn’t slept that night. Like the luckiest of little girls on Christmas morning, she’d felt as if she’d been given everything she’d ever dreamed of. She had Riccardo, a great career and a home. A real home, where love reigned—not dramatic tension that would take her who knew where next. And for the first time since she’d left Iowa as a teenager, scared and unsure of her future, she’d known everything was going to be okay.
She would have a family of her own—one that wasn’t living a hand-to-mouth existence. A family that wasn’t a dysfunctional, sordid mess.
Dreams could come true, she’d told herself, falling asleep in Riccardo’s arms at dawn.
The impossibly perfect memory made her suck in a breath.
She was still in love with her husband.
No matter how hard she tried to deny it, no matter how much she told herself they shouldn’t be together, it was never going to go away. That deep, gnawing pain that had started when she’d left him and never stopped.
She pried her eyes open and stared dully up at the grandfather clock in the hallway. Its rhythmical tick-tock was deafeningly loud in the still villa. She was mad about a man who’d spoken of their love in the past tense tonight. As if he was as sure as she was they’d done too much harm to each other ever to be able to recover from it.
And he was right. About all of it. She had shut down on him. She should have told him about her anorexia. She should have told him about the photos. Instead she’d run, like she always did.
But he had kissed Chelsea. And that wasn’t something she was sure she could forgive.
She bit her lip, vaguely registering the metallic taste of blood. The clock droned on...tick-tock, tick-tock. She had made huge mistakes in her marriage. But at least tonight she’d taken her first step forward. She’d told the truth. And that was something.
She bit her lip, refusing to give in to the fresh set of tears burning the back of her eyes. If it was clear they were over, then that was for the best. They had closure. In six months she was going to have to walk away from Riccardo, this time for good.
She was going to have to move on.
At least now she could.
She got to her feet, splashed cold water on her face and went back out to the terrace to wait for Riccardo. Two, three hours passed—she wasn’t sure. A million stars blanketed the dark Caribbean sky as she drank wine and listened to the rhythmic pull of the ocean.
Her eyes started to drift shut.
The clocks chiming midnight woke her. Disoriented and half asleep, she padded inside to a dark, empty villa. And realized her husband wasn’t coming back.
RICCARDO ENDED UP nursing a glass of ten-year-old rum on the front steps of a local rum shack in Holetown. Neat, as the grizzly old proprietor had suggested.
He’d needed a place he could think, away from the glitzy west coast hotels and restaurants. A place where he could digest his mind-blowing conversation with his wife. Because if he’d suspected before that he didn’t know all of her it was now brutally apparent he hadn’t even scratched the surface of who Lilly De Campo was.
Mind reeling, he’d wandered down the road from the villa until he’d come to the local hotspot—a red-and-cream-painted clapboard house emblazoned with the logo of a local beer company, one of dozens of such dwellings scattered around the island. There had been a handful of Bajans sitting on the front steps, chatting about last night’s cricket game, and zero expectations of socializing.
Perfetto.
He took a sip of the rum and was glad the proprietor had talked him into drinking it neat. It brought out the oaky molasses flavor of the blend and right now he needed its smooth burn. Needed to quell the tumult raging through his brain.
His wife had trusted him so little she’d paid a gossip columnist one hundred thousand dollars for pictures that weren’t even of him. Then she’d lied to him about where the money had gone.
Che diavolo.
He pulled in a deep breath. What state of mind must she have been in to do something like that? To air their dirty laundry to a tabloid journalist and expose their private lives rather than come to him? He wanted to shake her. To chastise her for being so stupid. Except it had also been his fault. He had given her reason to be jealous. He had violated the trust in their marriage.
He had almost smeared the past in her face without knowing it by being unfaithful to her like her father had her mother.
He uttered a smothered oath. The bombshells had just kept coming. His wife had been suffering from an eating disorder he hadn’t known about. She had been struggling with a disease only made worse by the limelight she’d been thrust into and he hadn’t noticed. How had he not noticed? It was inconceivable to him. He wasn’t an expert on eating disorders, but didn’t women usually make themselves throw up when they had one? He knew for sure he hadn’t missed that. Lilly hated throwing up, and when she did so because of her migraines she was miserable.
So where had been the signs he’d been supposed to see?
She’d always been tall and thin, and he’d thought that was her natural predisposition, but now that he thought about it she had been curvier when they’d met. She’d consistently lost weight throughout their marriage until she’d been ultra-thin at the end, but he’d thought that was because she’d wanted to fit into the designer dresses she’d worn. In hindsight, he admitted, shifting uncomfortably on the steps, her penchant for skipping meals near the end should have raised alarm bells. It was just that he hadn’t been home enough to monitor it.
A memory of Lilly, exhausted and seemingly emotionally spent, begging him to let her stay home the night of the financial district’s Christmas ball filled his head. He’d thought she was just being difficult and had insisted on her attending because it was a De Campo-sponsored event.
She’d obviously been struggling.
His hands tightened around the glass. He could have destroyed her by not knowing. By continuing to push her. Had he really been that oblivious? Was he so set on perfection in those around him she’d felt she couldn’t come to him? Couldn’t talk to him?
Had he been, as Lilly had accused, so caught up with his obsession of becoming CEO he hadn’t seen anything but the end goal?
An intense feeling of shame washed over him. There had
