Page 14 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

Given all of that, I decided to allow myself the agony of relief searing through me and the wet it brought to my eyes.

Dr. Taylor wheeled forward to place a hand on my knee and smile at me tenderly. “I don’t think I ever thought I’d see you so moved.”

I laughed, a choked-off, ugly sound. “Great bedside manner, Monica.”

She laughed too. “I do my best for my friends. Do you need a moment?”

“No, no.” I rolled my shoulders back and fixed her with my cool stare. “Run me through the procedure and let me look at my calendar, let’s get this booked in.”

“There are risks,” she warned. “You have endometriosis and significant fibroids. We’re talking about two procedures done simultaneously.”

A bitter coughing chuckle erupted from my lips. “Of course there are, and knowing my luck, I should know the worst-case outcome. But honestly, Monica, this is the best news I’ve had in so long…” I swallowed the unexpected surge of a sob rising in my throat and powered through. “It’s just good to know there’s a chance.”

“You’d have to continue with your therapy,” she reminded me. “There are mental obstacles to these kinds of issues as well, and Dr. Madsen seems to think it’s helping.”

I thought therapy was a waste of my valuable time, and I didn’t particularly like Dr. Madsen, but I only nodded, too relieved to put up my usual fight.

Monica smiled at me, a rich expression of joy that mimicked the feeling ballooning in my belly. “At the end of this, Elena, you’ll know carnal pleasure, and one day, I hope you’ll know the joy of being a mother. You might need additional hormone therapy to conceive because I’m worried about your estrogen levels, but natural conception should be a very real possibility.”

I swallowed the knot of tangled emotions in my throat and gave her a curt nod. I wanted to hope, but if life had taught me anything, it was that hope was a slippery thing, and just as soon as you found purchase with your hold, it slipped away again, elusive and cruel.

I’d once had everything I’d ever wanted, the job, the home, the man, but no sexual climax, no chance at fulfilling my dream of being a mother. It seemed a steep price to pay to swap one for the other, and I couldn’t help but be filled with bitterness at the thought that I couldn’t have it all.

I used to love my townhome. It was a Greek Revival three-story brick affair tucked away in the elite neighborhood of Gramercy Park. Daniel and I had bought it together after walking by it nearly every evening for weeks. At the time, when he was just hitting his stride with his real estate development firm, Faire Developments, and I was taking the Bar exam, it was at the upper end of our price range and entirely impractical. We were only two people, years out from starting a family, but Daniel had seen how much I loved it. He had known how I’d longed for a beautiful place to call home since I was a little girl tucked away in a rotting house the color of sunbaked urine in Naples.

He was that kind of man, the kind who would bend over backward to give his woman everything her heart desired.

To lose a man like that…well, thirteen months had passed, and I still felt the echo of his loss in my empty chest and the once-beloved, empty rooms of my townhome.

I felt the vibration of that loneliness pang through me as I opened the elegant black door to my house and stepped into the cool, neutral-toned interior. Keys went into the porcelain catch-all on the ivory side table, my carefully maintained Louboutin pumps in the closet beside it, and my cashmere coat hung above that.

Silence pulsed all around me as my stocking feet padded down the dark hardwood floors to the living room.

I’d thought, briefly, about getting a cat just to have a living creature yearn for my company, but just as quickly, I discarded the idea. I worked from seven in the morning until eight or nine every evening. The cat would resent me in the end, just as most people seemed to, and I didn’t think I could stand another rejection.

The quiet weighed on me that day, heavier than normal, so I did what I always did to shatter the silence and remind myself I was alive, even if there was no one to see it.

I cut diagonally across the room to the grand piano dominating the far corner, its surface glossy as an oil slick. My heart thundered in my ears as I dragged the stool out and perched on the cushioned edge. The metallic tang of adrenaline hit the back of my tongue as a quiver set into my long fingers, the digits trembling as I lifted the guard from the keys and pushed it back.

My body yearned for this the way addicts longed for their next hit.

Perhaps masochistically, I didn’t give in to the compulsion to play very often.

My siblings might have pursued creative careers against all the odds, but I was too pragmatic to indulge in my idle daydreams when we’d been poor and circled by carrion capos from the time we were born. I set my mind to better uses, but my soul—the wretched, dreamy thing—wouldn’t let me stay away from music for long.

I sucked in a deep lungful of air, trying to ignore the memories that threatened to drown me as I placed my fingertips on the cool ivories and began to play.

My eyes closed instinctively as “Somewhere Else” by my countryman Dario Crisman flowed from my hands into the glossy musical beast before me. It was one of the first complicated songs the hunchbacked old lady with nimble, youthful fingers who had taught me everything I knew about piano, Signora Donati, made me learn. It had resonated with me, the idea that somewhere else was a place I might one day be allowed to visit.

Until I was an adult, the glaringly bright and stench-strewn streets of Napoli were all I knew. Once, Christopher had taken me as far south as Sorrento. I remembered the cotton candy colors of the houses, how clean the streets seemed, and how true blue the water was without the murk and muck of a commercial fishing harbor to mar its beauty. But the memories were sullied by the very fact that Christopher, eighteen years older than me, had harnessed my girlish, sixteen-year-old excitement and made it malleable in his warm, searching hands.

I’d lost my virginity that weekend and returned feeling worldly both for my travels and my carnal experience. It wasn’t until later, when Christopher grew cruel, but more, when Cosima finally got us out of Napoli and away from him, that I realized what a nightmare that pretty place of Sorrento had symbolized for me.

Sorrow warped my throat into a misshapen swollen mess, air catching in the narrow channel until I felt I might choke.

I’d lost so much of myself before I’d ever truly known who I was.

It was strange to mourn for your own life, but as I sat at the piano and poured my overfull soul into the keys, the music sweet and aching in my ears, I said a little prayer that I might recover some of those precious fragments one day. That I might not go on so hollow and brittle, ready to crack into sharp pieces that might pierce anyone so brave as to pick them up.