The Don's Runaway Substitute novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: What I Was Afraid Of

I could not sleep that night, with the dig at dawn and Dario's promise of cake still in my ears.

Vincenzo lay on his back beside me in the dark, awake too, with his hand open on the sheet between us.

He had not touched me since the hall, when he took my hand and I let him.

He had cleaned the cut on my lip with a wet cloth, and then he had gone very quiet.

"Vincenzo."

"Yes."

"I want to ask you something. I should have asked it three years ago."

He turned his head.

"Anything."

"What are you afraid of?"

He did not answer for so long that I thought he had fallen asleep.

Then he sat up, and put his feet on the floor, and rubbed his face with both hands.

"That I'll wake up and find out it was all her," he said. "That I only ever slept because of your face."

"What do you mean?"

"The first week, I thought I was looking at a ghost." His voice was rough. "Then you called me at three in the morning, crying, and said you couldn't sleep."

"I remember."

"I drove across the city, and I sat on the edge of your bed, and you held my sleeve until you fell asleep. And I slept. Right there, in my coat."

I stared at him.

"I hadn't slept a whole night since she died," he said. "I had been sitting in my study with the light on."

"You never told me."

"You thought your calls were too much. I came home every night because they were the only thing that got me through it."

My throat hurt.

I had spent three years apologizing for needing him, and he had been the one waiting for the phone to ring.

"That's not tolerance," I said slowly.

"No."

"The line said patience. It said you were being kind to a thing you were going to put down."

"The lines were wrong about what it meant." He turned to me. "Mara. I used your face for three years, and I'll answer for it as long as I live. But I never once looked at it and saw her after the first week."

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