Page 4 of My Dark Ever After

I hadn’t known enough about the world to question if that past was anything more than uncomfortable. If it was dark and full of secrets that could, years later, affect me.

Now that I did, I refused to settle for silence.

And the only trump card I had to play was my own Italian history.

Dad glowered at me.

Once, it would have worked, but I’d fallen in love with a man whose glares could skin the hide off a rhino, so I only blinked in response.

“Damn it, Guinevere,” he growled, slipping the chair out so he could sink into it, hands going to his hair and mussing it for the first time all day. “I thought when we left your teenage years behind that we’d remained unscathed by this kind of rebellion from you. We had enough of it from Gemma.”

“Blind obedience isn’t something you should be proud of,” I countered, wincing at my own past naivete. “Youknewhow much I wanted to go to Italy. How much it meant to me. How I dreamed of it during those long stays at the hospital.” Despite myself, tears clogged my throat, turning my voice to ash. “Youknew, and you never gave me any reason or backstory. You just forbade me like an antiquated king with a princess in a fairy tale.”

“You should have respected me enough to take my word for it,” he said gruffly, hands white knuckled where they were clasped over the table.

“You should have respected me enough to tell me the truth,” I retorted, scalding tears racing down my cheeks.

This was the crux of the issue with both the men in my life.

How could they respect me—love me—if they didn’t trust me with the truth?

Vera, Raffa had called me.Truthin Italian.

Yet he had offered me none of his own honesty.

He might have been gone from my life forever, but my father was not. There was still hope there. I just needed him to explain himself so I could explain myself to him and we couldfinallyreach some kind of understanding.

“Have you ever considered not telling you the truth was to keep you safe?” Dad demanded, slamming a palm flat to the table as he leaned across it. “Did you ever consider I would cut out my own heartbefore putting you in harm’s way and that keeping you from that blood-soaked country was the least I could do to keep you safe? I left for a reason, Guinevere.”

“And I went for my own reasons,” I replied, suddenly exhausted by the fruitlessness of this conversation. An imitation of the one we’d had every week since I came home in August. “Until we can be honest with each other, we can’t fix this rift between us. Are you happy with the way things are?”

The question was bloody, a raw hunk of flesh I carved out of myself to offer to him.

Do you see the way I bleed because of this?I tried to convey.Do you see the way I ache to make things right?

But Dad only stared at me, a vein throbbing in his forehead.

“I love you, Dad,” I said after a long moment of silence. “But if I learned anything this summer, it’s that I have to love myself more than anyone else if I want to be healthy and happy. And I refuse to pretend I’m okay with you keeping secrets from me that affect my own life.”

“We can fix this,” he said with fervor, opening his hand to me even though I was too far away to take it. “Just put my past to rest, where it has lain buried for years, and look to the future with me. I-I can’t say I will forgive you easily for going to thatplacebehind my back, but you’re home now, and if you promise not to go back again, we can recover.”

A bitter laugh coughed up my throat.

Because I could promise that, really.

It wasn’t like there was anything for me left in Italy but broken promises and shattered dreams.

So why was it impossible to make that oath?

The idea of never returning was too final, ripping out the last roots of the love that had seeded, grown, and flourished in Tuscany.

It would eliminate the faint whisper of “what if” that haunted me in the darkest hours of the night, when I couldn’t sleep for the memories.

Despite everything, I could not make that oath.

The idea of never seeing Raffa again stabbed through me like a cold blade, even though I knew it was one of my own making. I had decided to leave him.

But,a small voice in my head murmured,he didn’t come after you. He hasn’t contacted you at all since you’ve been gone.