Page 204 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 5-8

‘I would so love Dominico to experience the wonder of having a child. And selfishly, of course, I would have loved to have met my grandchildren. Alas, the latter can’t happen now.’

Mari couldn’t bear it any longer. She broke down on a sob, one hand over her belly, the other over her face.

‘Oh, my dear, I’ve made you cry. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t be bothering you with all this rubbish. It’s ancient history now.’

‘It’s okay,’ Mari said. ‘You see, I had a miscarriage too,’ she admitted, her voice breaking. ‘I miscarried at five months. I lost twins, a tiny boy and a tiny girl.’

‘Oh, Marianne,’ Rosaria said, patting Mari’s hand. ‘That’s dreadful. I can’t imagine losing two at once. I can’t imagine anything worse.’

But it wasn’t the worst, Mari knew. The worst was that she hadn’t just lost her twins, she hadn’t just lost Dominico’s babies, but she’d lost Rosaria’s grandchildren too. The grandchildren she’d so wanted. The grandchildren Rosaria would never meet.

They would be twenty years old now. Adults who would have had twenty years to delight their grandmother growing up.

And it was so wrong. It was all kinds of wrong.

And along with her despair came the familiar guilt. What if she’d done things differently? What if she’d taken more care of herself, eaten better, worried less? What if there was just one tiny thing that would have resulted in a different outcome? The medical staff had been wonderfully supportive of course, assuring her that she’d done nothing to cause the loss of her babies, but then, Mari had been inconsolable. And after all, the staff were hardly going to tell her she’d done something wrong.

Rosaria took Mari’s hand in hers and squeezed, a surprisingly strong grip for one so frail. ‘Did you ever try again?’

She shook her head. Losing her twins had been devastating. She never wanted to leave herself open to that kind of anguish again. But that was hardly what Rosaria wanted to hear.

‘I…’ she started, before finding a better way to answer. ‘My then husband and I divorced. It didn’t happen again.’

‘So, it’s not too late for you now, is it? It’s not too late to give Dominico children.’

‘Oh,’ Mari said, blinking. This was not a question she’d expected. Of course, Rosaria would expect that Dominico and Mari had talked about the issue of children. ‘I’m thirty-nine. I don’t know.’

Rosaria nodded. ‘There’s time then. Can I ask you a favour?’

‘Anything.’

‘If you have a son, would you name him Roberto in honour of his grandfather?’

Mari sobbed quietly as she took Rosaria’s hand in hers. ‘Of course.’ A bittersweet promise. An empty promise. And the easiest promise she’d ever have to make because Mari knew it would never happen.

‘Thank you, my dear,’ Rosaria said. ‘I’m so glad Dominico found you again. He went looking for you, you know.’

Mari sniffed. ‘Who?’

‘Dominico. I told him he was wrong to let you go. He wanted to look after me because I was such a mess. He wanted to look after the business because there was so much to learn. He was trying to do everything right, but he was so miserable, I could see. He was missing you, and finally I convinced him that I was well enough and that he should go and find you.’

‘He did?’ Mari felt sick. ‘When?’

‘A year after he called you. He told me about that call, about finishing the relationship. He thought it was the right thing to do at the time. But later he regretted it, I know. So Dominico went with my blessing. He was angry when he returned. Angrier than I’d ever seen him before.’

A year after that call. Mari was reeling. She knew exactly what he would have learned. Her gut clenched. Her throat turned desert dry. ‘He found out that I was married.’

Rosaria nodded sadly. ‘He did.’

Mari squeezed her eyes shut. Dom had come looking for her. Not when she’d needed him so desperately, not in the midst of her anguish, but he had come back.

And she’d been gone.

Married.

The tectonic plates beneath her feet shifted and buckled, sending all she’d ever known about Dom’s abandonment and indifference into a range of mountain peaks that sharply challenged everything she’d ever assumed.

How had Dom felt when he’d discovered she’d married? How she wished she could go back and do things differently. Except she’d never known.

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