The Don's Wife Stopped Asking novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: Her Back to Him
I carried the page up the stairs in my hand and pushed his door open without knocking.
He was awake, sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark with his shirt undone.
He had not slept either.
"Read this," I said, and put it into his hand.
He turned on the lamp and read it, and I watched his face.
He read it twice.
"He told me it was his heart," Tancredi said. "At the funeral he stood next to me and said your father's heart gave out at his own kitchen table. I put my hand on his shoulder."
"I know."
"I carried the coffin."
"I know."
He folded the page along its crease and set it on the nightstand very carefully.
For a while neither of us spoke.
I stood in the doorway with my arms wrapped around myself, shaking with a cold that was not in the room.
He looked at me from the bed.
"Three years," Tancredi said. "Three years I came to your room, and you lay with your back to me."
I stared at him.
It was a strange thing to say, tonight, in that voice.
"Every time, until the study," he said. "You turned to the wall before I got to the bed. You never once reached for me. I thought, she has paid what she owes, and she is waiting for it to be over."
"That was the arrangement."
"I know it was the arrangement."
"You never stayed." My voice cracked. "You never once stayed. You came, and you left, and you shut the door. What was I meant to reach for?"
His face changed.
He opened his mouth and closed it again.
"I thought you couldn't stand the sight of me," he said.
"I couldn't stand the sight of what you'd let be done to me. I wasn't looking at you."
We stared at each other across the dark room.
I crossed it.
I climbed onto the bed on my knees, and I took his face in both hands, the way he had held mine in the study, and I kissed him first.
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