At his request, she’d been brought home after the inquest into her death in Italy. Had been buried as she had lived and died—without him.
His guilt was heavy. Still. It sat on his shoulders and refused to loosen its grip, even on his wedding day.
He’d left the house unseen, his departure unnoticed, and walked through the knotted trees in his wedding suit with one of the white blooms in his buttonhole. He’d made his way down the hill on the outskirts of the village and walked to the church. Arriving at the back gate to the small graveyard.
To see his mother.
‘I am getting married, Mamma,’ he said now, to the winds, to the soil, to the earth that protected her.
To his mother.
‘She is fierce,’ he continued. ‘This Flora Bick. She was hiding when I found her on the English coast. All jeans and pumps and cows. And still I saw her.Shining.But now she will wear ball gowns. Because she was born to do so, Mamma. She was born to walk into a room and shine the way you deserved to shine. In jewels, in dresses of silk, protected by a name of privilege. Protected and adored with my father’s wealth. I’m sorry my wealth wasn’t enough. I’m sorry I didn’t give you the choice to grieve in your own home when the man you loved died and with him your dreams of reconnecting with him. I’m sorry I was the one to tell you he was dead, and I’m sorry that I didn’t let you scream, cry, break things... I should have stayed with you. I never should have sent you to that private clinic, however esteemed it was. Because it was not where you wanted to be. But you found a way out, didn’t you? A way to be withhim.’
He shoved down the childish urge to ask her whyhehadn’t been enough to make her choose a different path out of that facility. Why she hadn’t talked to the therapists provided there. Talked tohim.
It didn’t matter. This was idiotic. But he needed her to know that he had not forgotten her. And to tell her what would happen next.
‘She wants me to do something—give her something I cannot. Because the rage—’ he swallowed down the lump in his throat ‘—the regret... It’s mine, isn’t it? It belongs to me. And forgiveness is yours to give. But still you do not speak to me.’
Raffaele closed his eyes, listened to the rustle of the trees and the call of the crows high in their towers.
Otherwise there was silence.
Had he expected anything else?
‘For years you told me you didn’t want me. Didn’t need me to bring home food. You didn’t need me to brush your hair. Help you slide into the bath...’
His voice trailed off as he remembered her frailty. Her refusal to fight. And in the end he hadn’t been strong enough to fight for them both.
‘I didn’t listen to you. I just kept brushing your hair. Kept trying to—’
He sucked it in. The frustration. The hotness of it. The visceral kick to his guts, as strong as it had ever been, that he hadn’t been able to save her from herself.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you. That I let your words get into my head and in the way of the duty I was bound to. And then I stopped brushing your hair.’
Every word he’d wanted to say for three months he said now. To whom, he didn’t know. She was gone. This white cross... This soft overturned earth... They were nothing more than a shrine for mourners. This graveyard was for the living, not the dead. But he carried on talking because he couldn’t stop.
‘I will get married today, Mamma, and I promise you this: I will protect my family. I will never pay for someone to care for them for me. She will get my name. My wealth will protect her. But I will never give her this disease—this promise of love that destroyed you. I cannot love her. But I will turn your house into the home you were never given, the home you were denied. Know from this day that everything my father denied to you I will give to her. To my wife. I cannot claim your forgiveness, but my promise is my redemption.Sheis my redemption.’
He turned his back on the grave, his breathing fast and shallow, and stopped. Everything blurred into one image. One person. One woman.
Her brown hair was in an elegant chignon. A pearl-tipped tiara sat in her hair. She wore a wedding dress with long lace sleeves with an intricately sewn pearl pattern down the length of the arms...around her throat.
‘How did you find me?’
Shewas his redemption?
Confirmed by a loveless vow promised to a dead woman?
Flora’s heart thumped wildly against the pearl buttons of the boned bodice of her dress.
Her wedding dress.
Here she stood, outside the church she was going to get married in, a bouquet in her hands of every colour, listening to a man who was promising never to love her.
And it hurt. It was palpable. His rejection of a love she hadn’t voiced. Already it was unwanted.
Her love.
