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She hadn’t missed my place.
She also hadn’t missed me.
It had been three weeks since she left, and I had finally admitted to myself that I missed her. Missed her so much that I’d practically moved into the Presidential Suite at the Palazzo Giordano, just a ten-minute walk from the flat—though distance made no difference.
Elysa had erased her presence from the apartment, yet somehow, she was everywhere. In the silence where jazz should have been playing, in the pristine counters where she should have been cooking, in the way the place now felt too perfect—lifeless, like a showroom instead of a home.
I looked up from going through the gala’s program, irritated by the mutinous look on her face. “Elysa, stop behaving like a child.”
I saw hurt flash in her eyes and wished I hadn’t said what I had. It was condescending buttrue. Still, I should be kinder, softer and allow her to have a snit or two. After all, in a year’s marriage, she’dnevercomplained, never given me any reason to think she was a problem or had one, which earned her the right to be irritating now that she’d told me she wanted out of the marriage.
“I can’t believe you’re making me do this.” There was a wealth of unhappy mixed with bafflement in hertone.
“Cara mia?—”
“Don’t call me what you callher,”she hissed.
I raised an eyebrow. “Are you jealous?”
She scoffed. “No, Dante, it’s disrespectful that you call your current girlfriend and soon-to-be ex-wife by the same endearment.”
I smirked. She wasn’t a darling; she was a little lioness. “Okay,mileoncina?—”
“Dante, I don’t likethatwoman,” she pleaded, cutting me off. “She…she’s mean to me.”
“That’s something a toddler would say,” I admonished softly. “Elysa, she’s not going to be mean to you,” I added to appease her.
She crossed her arms over her chest, not in defiance but as a way to protect herself.
“She’s not,” I assured her.
Had I been hasty and bloody-minded in not listening to her?
Elysa looked at me with wounded eyes. I didn’t want to hurt my wife. I never wanted to hurt her, but I felt like that was what I kept doing.
“I promise she’s just here to get you ready, and she’s going to be the epitome of polite.” I put a hand on her shoulder to calm her, but she pulled away.
I’d seen this woman naked. We’d made love at least every other night, if not more, for the time we were married. It crushed me that she didn’t even want me to touch her—not innocuously, not casually—like my hands had become something unwelcome.
I suddenly felt bereft, hollow in a way I hadn’t expected. Would she still curl up against me if we sat down to watch a movie?
Probably not.
The thought of all the little ways she had once been mine slipping away unsettled me more than I wanted to admit.
“You decided I wasn’t worth taking seriously,” she told me sadly. “I’m once again supposed to smile and make nice with someone who insulted me, and you’re asking me to pretend it didn’t happen.”
I kept my tone calm and reasonable because someone needed to be the rational one. Though, I wished I had dismissed Patrizia and found someone else. This argument was simply not worth it.
“Elysa, I spoke to Lucia about it. She knows Patrizia well, and she assured me there’s no way she would say something like that. Patrizia is too professional to insult you or anyone else. You must have misunderstood.”
I could see the moment Lucia’s name was out of my mouth that Elysa was pissed off. That I got, based on her suspicions about my relationship with Lucia—but the anguish I saw—that I had not expected.
“Misunderstood? Really, Dante?”
“Si,” I remarked firmly. “Maybe the phrasing or tone wasn’t what you thought it was. You don’t speak Italian fluently?—”
Her jaw tightened. “I know enoughto know what she said, Dante. And even if I didn’t, I’m not an idiot. I can read the tone, the condescension…and the gaslighting.” Now, she wasn’t just talking about Patrizia; she was talking about me.