Page 68 of Italian’s Christmas Acquisition

“One billion dollars, and you. A thousand properties, and you. And if I had to choose to keep one, it would be you. But that isn’t love. It’s like a sickness inside of me. And it grows, more and more by the day. I don’t want you to leave. I don’t want you to have a bed-and-breakfast. I want to keep you so happy that you forget that you ever had a life with anyone else.”

“Rocco...”

His eyes were wild, and she knew that what he was saying was true, but there was a fury in it. One that she couldn’t even see the bottom of. He was angry. With himself, possibly. With her.

With everything.

“We can talk about this...”

“No. It’s unbearable. You... You need to go home.” He forked his fingers through his hair. “I need you gone.”

“What?”

“I need you to go. Because this growing thing inside of me is... It’s the thing that I’m most afraid of. And I will trap you with me. In my room. There will be no boundaries, there will be no escape. I won’t do it to you.”

“You can’t make my choices for me.”

“The hell I can’t. Because I’m making them for me too. I need things to go back to the way they were. There is... There is something... I can’t put my finger on it, I can’t name it, but ever since you came into my life something inside of me has shifted, and I can’t figure out how to put it back.”

“It’s the same for me. It’s love. It changed me. It made me want different things.”

“If you wanted different things you would never have asked to leave.”

“No, I would have. Because it is still part of me. But so are you. Love doesn’t have to destroy everything that you are. It just makes you more.”

“Not me. It is destroying me.”

Love. He said it was destroying him. Which meant that he must feel it. But he wouldn’t admit it. He was absolutely terrified, and she could see it. This brave, mountain of a man.

Was afraid of her. Afraid of what she made him feel.

“You said you wanted to feel the happiness that I felt. The wonder that I felt, can’t you try to feel the love that I feel.”

“No,” he said. “Please... Do not ask me to.”

“Rocco... Don’t ask me to go.”

“The damage is done,” he said. “I have ruined us both. The papers have already run all the stories and...”

“So don’t send me away.”

“It is one or the other,” he said. “Either I want to hoard, or I want nothing. And I need to go back to wanting nothing. I need to go back to when it all felt simple. When I figured out how to need no one.”

“This isn’t about you wanting to lock me away. This is about you being afraid of needing me. Because your mother left you alone, and you couldn’t count on her and...”

“You are not my psychiatrist. Do not seek to tell me what is in my heart or in my mind. Just go.”

It was shattered. The glass. The illusions.

But perhaps it was for the best.

Because it would have ended. She had been right. All those years later, it would’ve ended. There would’ve been infidelity. There would’ve been messes and weeping and their children would’ve gone, and it would’ve been the two of them, not knowing how to be.

But even as she obeyed him, as she allowed herself to be driven to the private plane with her heart shattered into pieces, and her very breath painful, she foolishly wished that they’d had that life. All those years between now and heartbreak. Because at least they would’ve had that life.

And now, she had nothing. Nothing at all.

She knew the plane would have to stop for fuel on the East Coast, and she asked that they go through Florida.

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