Page 165 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

She shakes her head, her attention on our daughter.

I don’t want to leave and yet I move out of the room, fumbling for my phone, my hands shaking. The doctor is talking to Olympia now and she doesn’t need me any more. Our baby is born.

Out in the hallway, I hit the number for Ulysses and wait, still dazed.

‘Zakynthos,’ he answers.

All thought goes out of my head. For years I’ve wanted revenge on this man and that was all I could think about but now… Now I’ve even forgotten why I was so angry with him in the first place.

Your father. Your mother. Remember?

Ah yes, that’s right. Revenge. But it feels so distant now, the anger that drove me. And after recounting all those happy childhood stories to Olympia, it doesn’t even feel like me.

‘You have a niece,’ I say hoarsely.

There’s a silence and then he says, ‘Santangelo?’

‘Yes.’

‘Olympia, how is—’

‘She’s well. She’s fine and so is the baby.’

Another silence.

‘Have you been forbidding her from seeing me?’ he asks.

It’s a question I’m not expecting. ‘No,’ I say, my brain still feeling sluggish and slow. ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Then why doesn’t she visit?’

But I know the answer to that and I find myself saying, to my enemy, ‘Because she doesn’t want you to know that she’s unhappy.’

‘If you have hurt her,’ Zakynthos snarls down the phone, ‘I will personally cut out your heart and feed it to you.’

I shut my eyes, a curious, deep pain radiating through me. ‘I’m sorry,’ I hear myself say. ‘I should never have taken her. I should never have even touched her.’

‘No,’ he says tersely. ‘You shouldn’t have. But you did and so here we are. Now. Why is she unhappy?’

It’s a valid question and I have to answer. ‘Because she loves me.’

Another silence, even longer this time.

‘And you don’t love her?’ he asks. ‘Be very, very careful how you answer.’

I swallow, my mouth dry, my heart like a drum in my chest. And I open my mouth to say no, but even as I go to shape the word, I know it’s a lie. It was a lie six months ago and it’s a lie still. Idolove her. I’ve loved her since the moment I saw her in a red gown with a dragonfly clip in her hair in Singapore, and I have no idea what to do about it.

Love wasn’t something I ever wanted to involve myself with again, because I know how it can rip your life apart. How once given, you can’t take it back, no matter how badly you want to. And how in the end, even after you’ve given up everything for it, it’s still not enough.

‘I do love her,’ I say, my voice still hoarse. ‘But…’

‘But what?’ he says impatiently.

And I realise then that I have to think about this, that I can’t just push it aside for once. That the question of love isn’t about what I do and don’t want, it’s about fear. My fear.

‘I’m afraid,’ I say slowly, knowing even as I do that admitting a vulnerability to this man is a mistake. ‘I’m afraid it’s not enough. That I won’t be able to make her happy.’

And it’s true. My very existence wasn’t enough to stay my father’s hand when he picked up that gun, and as for my mother, she was too bound up in grief to think about me. And I was their son. So what am I to Olympia? The man who got her pregnant, kidnapped her, forced her into marriage, and who made her stay here in my villa, with my baby. Who made her love him.