I Won't Bridge an Impossible Gap novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Through the Hedge

Alessio's POV

I let the registrar's slot go by at five o'clock.

Nina sat on the villa steps with her shoes off, and watched the hands of her watch pass the hour, and said nothing.

"Not today," she said at last. "I want to see what you do when no deadline is making you."

"All right."

"That's all?"

"That's all."

She put her head on my good shoulder, and I did not move until she fell asleep.

At midnight I laid her on the bed in the east wing, and I went out alone.

There is a gap in the hedge between my father's garden and the Montanari garden.

I found it when I was nine, and Ilaria found it when she was eight, and we used it for twenty years.

I went through it on my hands and knees, in a suit.

Her father's men had gone home with their heads down.

The villa was dark except for the kitchen, where a lamp burned on the table.

The back door was unlocked.

Ilaria sat at the kitchen table in the black dress she had worn to the council, with her shoes off and a laptop shut in front of her.

She did not look surprised.

"You came through the hedge," she said.

"Yes."

"You'll ruin that suit."

"I've ruined worse."

I sat across from her.

The same table, the same lamp, the same bread knife in the same block.

She had stolen a plum from this kitchen for me when we were ten.

"I came to say something I should have said when we were nine," I said.

"Don't."

"I have to. I never loved you."

She stared at the lamp.

"Not once. Not as a boy, not as a man. I loved you like a sister I was cruel to. And I let you think there was more, because every time you hoped, it was easier to leave it than to stop you."

Her mouth twisted.

"Easier."

"Yes. It's what I do. I say let it go, I go quiet, and I tell myself that I'm being kind. I did it to you for twenty years, and I did it to Nina for five."

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