Page 7 of Reaching Hearts

He wakes up fast. I can hear him sitting upright in our bed. “Cosa é successo? You hurt?”

Slinking down to the floor with my head in my hand, I go over some of the details, wrapping myself in a spider web of half-truths that I will never get out of.

“I can’t believe I wasn’t there,” he says when I’m done, his voice so worried it sounds angry.

“You couldn’t have done anything,” I say quietly.

“Did he break in?”

“No,” I pause, struggling for lies. “I guess I forgot to lock it. It was a mistake.” In so many ways.

“Bella, you need to be careful.”

I close my eyes and lightly pound the back of my head against the door, my toes turned in and my knees bent. “I know. I should go. My team is here helping me clean. They’re waiting for me.”

“Annie, this is all on me now and then you go?” The language barrier sometimes skews his words, but since I know him so well, I know what he means.

“I wish I was sleeping next to you. I wish none of this ever happened.” It feels good to say something honest. And really… what am I doing in this city?

“Come home, Bella.”

“I don’t know.”

“Please come back.”

I should go. I could close Le Barré and call it a learning experience. My employees will find other jobs. They’re not going to be making money while we’re closed anyway, and how long will it take to reopen? Why am I here? The universe obviously doesn’t want me here. I was about to go to the hospital and Christiano wakes up to call me at that exact moment? I finally see Brendan after all these years and we’re held up at gunpoint? He nearly dies? None of this is supposed to be happening.

It can’t be this hard.

I open my lips to tell him yes, feeling the weight of failure and defeat.

Christiano sighs. “Just let me help you.”

I freeze and close my mouth. Like a rubber band snapping, defensiveness rises. We’ve had this argument too many times for me to not feel the old familiar surge of pride. “I need to do something on my own.”

He’s exasperated, as he is every time we talk about this. “I know. But this is more than standing on your feet. When a ship is sinking, you abandon it.”

I straighten up on the floor, rise to standing. “At least I have my own ship. I have to go. I have people who need me,”

“Annie, it is not bad being helped. Are your employees helping? How different is this?”

“It’s different!”

“How, Bella? How?”

“Because they’re helping me fix something I created. Your life, Christiano – you created it! I just fit myself into it. It was your house. Your furniture. Your friends.”

“You took them when it suited you.”

A pause hangs as wide as the miles between us. “Christiano, I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you by leaving things so ambiguous like this.”

“Ambiguous,” he asks with that tone he uses when he doesn’t understand a word.

“Leaving things up in the air, unsettled. Am I coming back or not…”

“You always say you are.”

I don’t speak. “I want to. I wish we’d stop fighting about this.”

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