Page 35 of The Return of Her Billionaire Husband

But Joe did the opposite. He walked calmly, silently into the bathroom, and when he returned a few minutes later she was gone.

* * *

Later, Juliette could barely recall how she got to the airport and on a plane to London without displaying the devastation she felt. It was as if she had split herself into two people—one was calm and logical and rational, able to call a taxi, pay the driver and board a plane without a qualm. The other was a broken, shattered shell, limping through the steps to get her to somewhere safe where she could address her terrible wounds.

Joe didn’t want another child.

Joe didn’t love her.

He had never loved her.

She had fooled herself into believing otherwise. She had constructed a dream landscape where the pain of the past would fade into the background, not quite going away but no longer causing the distress it once had. A landscape where the birth of another baby would bind her and Joe in the joys of parenthood, their marriage thriving instead of dying. How could she have been so naïve? How could she have allowed herself to think they had a future when he was unable—unwilling—to love her?

Was there something wrong with her that she was destined to crave a love she couldn’t have?

Juliette had always doubted her parents’ love for her, seeing it as conditional rather than unconditional. She had thought Harvey, her ex, had loved her and had foolishly believed it when he’d said the words so often and so volubly. But that had also been a lie.

She huddled into her seat on the plane and looked listlessly out of the window at the clouds drifting by. Her heart ached as if an invisible corkscrew were driving through it on the way to her backbone.

So, it was finally over.

Her marriage to Joe Allegranza was dead.

Unsalvageable.

Could there be anything crueller than to dangle hope in front of her and then snatch it away? Every kiss, every touch, every time they made love, she felt that he loved her. How could she have been so misguided? So fanciful? So deluded?

It was time now to move on and forge a new path for herself. A new future.

Juliette’s heart gave another painful spasm.

Without Joe...

* * *

Joe spent the first week after Juliette left throwing himself into work, largely helped by a bridge collapse in northern Spain. Fixing other people’s problems was the only way to distract himself from his own unfixable ones. But, as much as he found his work rewarding and challenging in equal measure, he began to realise it no longer filled the gaping chasm Juliette had left behind. His work was like temporary scaffolding holding up a compromised building.

He was the compromised building, constructed from materials that were now seriously out of date.

Stoicism, self-reliance, a fierce desire for control, emotional lockdown, an isolationist mind-set were no longer materials in a man’s life that worked, if indeed they ever had. They were destroying him like termites in the foundations, quietly, secretly, stealthily destabilising and destroying the man he had the potential to be.

But where to start to fix such deep-seated faults?

He knew exactly where—at the beginning.

* * *

Joe’s mother’s grave was sadly neglected and a deep sense of shame washed over him as he knelt down beside it and pulled out the weeds from around her plot. He placed the flowers he’d brought with him in the stone vase and sat back on his heels to read the words engraved on the marble headstone.

Giovanna Giulia Allegranza

A loving wife and mother

Missed for ever

He had no knowledge, no physical memory of his mother, and yet he sensed how much she must have loved him. He was touched that his father had insisted the word ‘mother’ was included on her headstone even though she hadn’t regained consciousness to hold Joe in her arms. Why hadn’t he noticed that before now? All those times his father had dragged him to the graveyard, Joe had stood sullenly to one side as his father tended the grave with tears pouring down his face. It had repulsed Joe, made him feel his father was weak and unable to control his emotions, that he had loved his wife too much.

Why had he adopted such toxic notions about manhood? Why had he denied himself for all these years the full breadth and depth of his humanity? The ability to feel and express deep emotion, the ability to willingly relinquish control over things that couldn’t be controlled in any case, to acknowledge his grief over the loss of his baby daughter.

---