Page 111 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Diego felt himself swim through a strange, cloudy mist. He did not hear any voices, and that was both pain and comfort. He wasn’t hallucinating anymore, but for a brief few moments, it had felt as though his family had returned.

“I suppose it is lucky you have such a hard head.”

He almost winced, thinking the ghost voices were gone but now they were back and he’d have to have a psychiatric evaluation to go along with whatever it took to recover from his injuries.

But after a second or two, he realized it was Amelia’s voice.

He forced his eyes open, though they were slow to obey. The room was bright, but not as bright as it had been when he was on the side of the road, bleeding and…hallucinating.

Slowly, things focused, and his gaze settled on Amelia. She stood by his bed, dressed in a drab black. But her hair glowed like a halo, and her silver eyes regarded him.

Perfect Amelia. His angel. His hope.

Because her voice was connected with a living, breathing body. She was real and…he had pushed her away. Pushed her love away. And she was still here.

He still did not believe in the voices, but maybe…maybe he was being given some second chance. A chance to see past the grief, release the crutch of guilt and make things right.

He could make things right.

He opened his mouth, but he couldn’t seem to make words come out. Not her name. Not Forgive me . Not I love you . Not I swear to God, I heard our families’ voices .

“Shh,” she said, moving closer to the bed. “There will be time to talk yet. The doctors are feeling positive about your chance for recovery,” she said, pulling a chair next to the bed.

He yearned for her to reach out and touch him, but her hands were carefully folded in her lap. It hurt deep in his chest, while his physical injuries seemed like a dull ache underneath the mists—some kind of painkiller, no doubt. But this pain could not be dulled by any medication.

It was the pain of failure and fear and everything she’d ever accused him of. It was the pain of losing her, when he could have reached out and held her instead.

But there was still time. He had been given time. Somehow.

“I will not scold you for driving into a snowstorm and nearly getting yourself killed,” she said primly.

“You made your choices, and now you will deal with your consequences.” She said this very firmly, but he got the feeling she was speaking more to herself than him.

Reminding herself she would not baby him when this was his own fault.

And it was his fault. To run away. To hide away. These were the choices he’d made, and they were his fault. But they were not irreversible mistakes. He could learn a damn lesson. He would.

For her.

Because he had been given a second chance. A second chance not allowed his family. Which meant he owed it to them to use it wisely instead of wasting it in grief and self-punishment.

This time when he opened his mouth, he managed to rasp out words. Because he had to tell her… “I… I had the strangest dream or hallucination out there. All of them. Their voices.”

Her eyebrows beetled together, and she glanced back at the door. He realized his words were garbled, didn’t make much sense, and she was worried, likely, he’d suffered some debilitating head injury.

Of course, the words wouldn’t make much sense even if he could speak clearly. Hearing voices. But he knew, in this moment, he needed Amelia’s take. He had to know what she thought.

He tried again, this time working to make sure he enunciated each word. It was still raspy, but at least she seemed to make it out this time.

“Whose voices?” she asked, still sounding quite concerned.

He should probably not try to explain it to her. It was insanity. But…she had to know, didn’t she? She had to assure him it had been a hallucination, or he might actually start to believe it.

Ghosts. Angels. Love from some great beyond.

“My family. Your father. They…spoke to me. Told me to get to my phone. Told me I could not…leave you.” He shook his head, but it left him feeling dizzy and nauseous. “A dream. Something pulled me out of the car, but it was just a dream. I had to have done it, of course.”

Her eyes got very wide, and she leaned forward. He yearned for her to put her elegant hand on his face, but she didn’t. She did speak though.

“The police… I talked to them outside. They cannot reconstruct how you managed to get yourself out of the car. They’re looking for whoever might have helped you, but they haven’t found them yet.”

“I… I had to have crawled out. It was nothing but light that pulled me out, but that was a dream. It doesn’t make sense. The voices, they were just…hallucinations to get me through.”

“Diego, they also haven’t been able to track down who made the emergency call…”

“Ghosts cannot make phone calls, Amelia,” he said, sounding very certain…even though he felt not at all certain. “Someone saw it from far away. That’s the only reasonable explanation.”

But he looked at her gray eyes and knew she did not chalk it up to anything reasonable. To Amelia, some afterlife interference had saved him. A guardian angel. Or angels.

He didn’t know if he would ever be able to fully believe that, but what he did believe in this moment was that he had been given a second chance.

One not afforded to his parents, his sister, Bartolo. And he could blame himself for that—it would be so easy to blame himself for that—but instead he let it go.

Whatever selfish acts he had done that might have caused damage, he had not been the reason for their deaths.

“Amelia, you must let me… There is so much to discuss.”

She looked down at her lap. “Diego, I am not here for any discussion.”

“Amelia.”

“I’m going to handle the logistics of getting you home, hiring you a nurse, of course, until you are well enough to go to your cabin. I won’t leave you in the lurch laid up in a hospital bed, but you should know, I plan to quit the moment I have secured all you need to get by.”

“Amelia.”

She did not look up. She kept her eyes decidedly downcast. “We both have made our choices. So now we must live with the consequences.”

“Am I not allowed to change my choices?”

She so badly wanted to cry. Bury her head in his chest and feel the rise and fall of it and sob . He was so injured, but alive.

Alive. That was all that mattered. He had survived. He would survive.

Am I not allowed to change my choices?

Was it weakness to say yes? Weakness to say no?

A tear tripped over and onto her cheek, though she tried desperately to keep them in check. It fell from her cheek onto her hands, clasped in her lap.

“Amelia.” His voice was a pained rasp. “Look at me, tesoro .”

She did not want to. Partly because she hated seeing his face. Swollen and bandaged. There was so much damage to him. He could have so easily lost his life, and then what ? What would she have done or felt?

It didn’t do to deal in what if s, though. She knew that all too well.

She blinked back the tears still in her eyes, lifted her face to look at him.

“I know it was a dream,” he said, his voice that horrible rasp, but his eyes were luminous and dark. Determined. “A hallucination. It could only have been. But your father’s voice… He said I could not leave you like he did.”

Anger sparked inside of all this pain . “Well, by all means, change your mind over a hallucination.” She nearly got up and left right then, but he continued to speak.

“No, tesoro , you misunderstand me,” he said, a laugh to his voice. A laugh . “This voice that sounded as though your father was talking to me was full of guilt, and why should he be guilty? I caused his crash.”

“I am done with your guilt, Diego.” She got to her feet this time. If she stayed, she might be swayed by him, and she could not let herself be. He’d had some sort of near-death experience, but he still didn’t understand.

“Let me finish, Amelia.” He reached out, and somehow, even with the hospital bed and machines and grave injury, his hand grasped her arm.

“Please. Please stay. Listen. Perhaps I do not deserve it. Perhaps I was always right and there was never any good meant for me—but please , let me finish.”

He was so desperate, and he was injured.

Am I not allowed to change my choices?

It didn’t matter if he changed them, did it? Didn’t she have to make her own?

Of course, making her own didn’t mean she had to leave. She could hear him out. It would be best to hear him out so she’d have no regrets.

So this could be a clean break. So she could have a clean future.

Without him. Your future is without him.

Slowly, she lowered herself back into her chair, holding on to this little mantra. His grip on her arm didn’t loosen, and she had to lean forward to make sure he wasn’t hurting himself by holding on to her.

“I thought I was dying. Perhaps I was. But these voices were just…just like when they’d been alive.

My parents and Aurora bickering. Your father giving me orders I didn’t know how to follow.

I knew it wasn’t real, but it felt so real.

I could… feel them.” He shook his head, pain etched across his bruised features.

Amelia’s heart felt bruised too. She desperately wanted to reach out, touch him, skin to skin, some reassurance, but she did not.

“Perhaps you were saved by the ghosts of Christmas past.” She suggested this both because she couldn’t help but believe there’d been some kind of otherworldly help he’d received, but also because she expected him to scoff.

Instead, he shook his head, but then it changed into a kind of nod.

“Hell, none of it makes sense, so why not?” He closed his eyes for a moment, as if the pain was too much.

But when he opened them, his dark eyes were intent and sure.

“But the past is gone. And I have not lived in the present. I have lived in guilt because it was easier. I have always taken the easy way, Amelia.”

She opened her mouth to defend him, then snapped it shut. She would not defend him to himself. No, he had to make some strides on his own.

“Somewhere along the line, I learned that it hurt less to retreat, to not try, to believe the worst in myself rather than someone else believe the worst in me. Somewhere along the line, hurting less became my only goal. And then after they all died, and it felt like my fault, I thought it only made sense to make myself hurt more. And more and more. I never questioned it. I have only understood all or nothing.”

Though she’d known this, it was something else to hear him say it, admit it. In a raspy voice, his body in a hospital bed. It made it impossible to deny that this horrible event might have finally gotten through to him.

“You showed me something else,” he continued.

“Both pain and joy. Forgiveness and responsibility for my own decisions. You showed me there could be all these different things, and they are hard, yes. Which is why I felt as if I could not… I did not think I could handle this dichotomy. I did not want to try.”

She had known all this. Had known that his inability to try things stemmed from his own issues. She had tried to tell him all this, but he hadn’t listened.

Except, if he was saying it now, he had listened. It had just taken time—and maybe a horrible car accident—to get through to him.

“I woke up to their voices. I thought I was going to die. Which I thought may be my due, but I did not want to leave you. Not just because I did not want you to be hurt, but because we had never had a chance. And this was my fault, all my fault, but instead of guilt and pain, I want to change . To work.”

Her breath caught in her throat. Unable to stop the tears that fell now as he said the rest, his gaze intense and direct, his hand still clutching her wrist.

“None of it matters. The voices, being saved, if you cannot forgive me and bear with me as I try to…heal. I want to…live again. In love this time. Not in penance.”

Amelia’s chest felt as though it had been cleaved in two, but inside that pain was a warm, beating heart that loved him. And that hadn’t changed with rejection. She could not erase the fact she loved him.

“I love you, Amelia. I do not deserve you, but I will work to. I cannot change my past, my choices, my consequences, but you have showed me I can make new choices. I would like to. With you. If you’d let me.”

Amelia could not find words at first. Her eyes were full of tears, her throat tight with them.

Now it was her turn to make a choice, and the only one she wanted to make was him. Them.

But what if…

She frowned at the sound of a bell, which sounded like the one on the tree at the castello that sometimes tinkled when she didn’t think it should. She looked around the room but saw no evidence of any bell.

Her gaze fell back to Diego. There was a knowing in his eyes, and a warmth around the both of them.

Was it a ghost? A sign? Just a trick of sound and light?

She supposed it didn’t matter.

She had lost her mother and her father far too young, with no second chances. How could she deny a second chance with love when she had it?

“We both have some work to do, caro , but I love you, Diego. A good Christmas present foundation to build our Christmas future on.”

His mouth curved ever so slightly, his eyes fluttering closed, clearly exhausted. “I suppose we shall have the ghosts for each.”