Page 36 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

She buried her face in her hands and let the tears fall as they would.

Dioni cried and cried. She cried for a good long while. Because her best friend was here and her brother knew and everything was tense and broken, but she had to believe that it was better.

Even if it didn’t feel anything likebetter.

And she had been pregnant forever. She was huge and uncomfortable and unwieldy, but she had also never felt more beautiful in all her life. And she was having a son. She would be holding a chubby little fist in hers soon enough, and she adored him already though she hadn’t even met him yet, and she wanted his life to be as beautiful as she could make it no matter if he hadn’t been planned.

And she was so in love with her husband that she couldn’t see straight. It got worse by the day. Every time he touched her. Every time he looked at her. Every time he said her name, it made her love him more and made that stillness, that certainty that she was in the right place with the right person, expand within her—buthewanted only totake responsibilityfor her.

For her and the child they’d made.

And that wasn’t the same thing at all.

When she looked up again, Jolie had cleared the library of men. She had steered Dioni back down to the sofa. Now she sat beside Dioni and kept her arm tight around her friend’s shoulders, the way she had always done. The way Dioni had done for her, too, on the few occasions either one of them gave in to emotion.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t try to rush Dioni through the storm. Jolie sat with her and helped her weather it.

It hurt to think how long it had been since they’d seen each other. Ithurt.

“Well,” Dioni said ruefully as the last of the tears subsided, wiping at her face. “That went about as hideously as I expected it would.”

“I think,” Jolie said with great confidence and a squeeze, “that when the smoke clears, we’ll all find this very funny. It’s the surprise of it all that’s overshadowing everything at the moment, but that won’t last. You must know that the two of you are his favorite people. It will dawn on him that there could be no better man for his sister than Alceu.” She smiled. “And if it does not, I will be certain to hasten that dawn along.”

A rush of something sharper than simple guilt washed over her then, and Dioni turned toward her friend so she could look at her full-on. “I wanted to tell you a thousand times. I wrote you letters, sometimes five times a day. I’ve saved them all on my mobile, but I never sent them.”

“I wish you had,” Jolie said simply.

There were no recriminations. No expressions of hurt feelings. That was all she said.

But it was enough.

That guilt didn’t go away, but it was gentler, then.

Dioni let out a sigh. “I couldn’t tell you, much as I wanted to. It was right after your wedding, and things were not... I wasn’t sure how things were between you and Apostolis. I didn’t want to tell him, so I couldn’t bring you into this and worry that you’d feel youhadto tell him.”

“I wouldn’t have told him,” Jolie protested. But she considered that for a moment. “To be honest, I’m not sure what I would have done. I’ve kept secrets from him before. I don’t know that I ever will again. But I suppose the real question is, why were you afraid to tell him?” She frowned. “Did you think that he would stop loving you, Dioni? He might rant and rage, but he would do anything for you. Surely you must know this.”

And so Dioni poured it all out to the one person she thought would understand, as she had long wished she could. That she knew that he would try to fix it. That she needed to fix it herself, whatever that looked like. That her brother was wonderful, but if she was going to be the mother of a human being—and it appeared she was, and rather soon—she really, truly, needed to sort this all out for herself.

“I thought I would simply live off in America for as long as possible, then present a fully grown child to him when I came home and refuse to answer questions,” she said. When Jolie laughed, she shrugged. “I planned to be mysterious for the rest of my life because I certainly had no intention of telling Alceu about any of this. And if I didn’t tell him, why would I tell anyone?”

When her friend made a face at that, as if not wanting to tell Alceu was an unreasonable position, she explained. How that night—Jolie’s wedding night—had gone. The things he said. The fact that he had used the wordpity.

“I would not have told him either,” Jolie said, rolling her eyes. She let out a laugh.“Men.”

Dioni nodded, more relief washing through her then, because Jolie understood exactly how crushing it had been. To bepitiedwhen she had been wildly and madly in love. “Imagine my surprise when he appeared in New York in all his state, as if I had gotten pregnant on purpose to spite him, and demanded that I marry him.”

“I can imagine that.” Jolie smiled, sitting back against the sofa. “Just as I can imagine that you somehow failed to mention to him that you’ve been in love with him for the whole of your life.”

“Notin love,” Dioni corrected her, flushing slightly. “Have I had a certain tenderness toward him? Yes. Have I been, at certain times, preoccupied with him? Also yes. But what do those things amount to, in the end?”

“Apparently, they amount to a wedding and baby boy, though not necessarily in that order.”

They both laughed then, leaning into each other as they did, and it was suddenly as if there had been no separation between them. Dioni talked her friend through every detail of the last seven months. And in her turn, Jolie told her how things were going at the Hotel Andromeda, and in her marriage, and all the secrets that she was no longer keeping because she and Apostolis had truly found their way at last.

“You seem happy,” Dioni said, when that had never been something Jolie had expected or even aspired to. “Are you truly happy?”

“I am finally living up to my name,” Jolie said, and she looked it.

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