Unwrapping the Castelli Secret

by Caitlin Crews

  “Anything would be a better solution!” she threw at him.

  He dropped his hand, though he didn’t step back for another jolting beat or two. That was her heart, she understood, not the world itself, though it was hard to tell the difference. She couldn’t look at him—she couldn’t bear it—so she directed her gaze out through the glass again instead, where the best thing they’d ever done together rolled a ball of snow that was bigger than he was across the snowy garden.

  This is about Arlo, she reminded herself. This is all about Arlo. Everything else that happens is secondary.

  “Name one, then,” Rafael said, dark and too close. Daring her, she thought. Or begging her—but no. That wasn’t Rafael. He didn’t beg. “Name a better solution.”

  She shot him a look, then looked back toward their son. Their beautiful son, whom she’d loved hard and deep and forever since the moment she’d known he existed. Right there in that truck stop bathroom. She’d been terrified, certainly. And so alone. But she’d had Arlo and she’d loved him, long before she’d met him.

  “You can think whatever you like,” Lily said, low and fierce. “But none of the choices I made were easy. Not one of them. They all left scars.”

  “None of that changes where we are, does it?” he asked, his own voice quiet, and yet it still tore through her. “Our scars are of our own making, Lily. Each and every one of them. I find I can’t forgive that, either.”

  Lily didn’t answer him. And the next time she glanced over, he’d gone.

  She told herself that was just as well.

  And maybe it wasn’t entirely surprising that the nightmares came back that night. And the next. And the night after that, too.

  The screech of brakes, the sickening spin. That horrifying, stomach-dropping, chilling understanding that she wouldn’t—couldn’t—correct it. Then the impact that had thrown her from the car and left her sprawling, or so she’d pieced together afterward. She’d found herself facedown in the dirt, completely disoriented, scraped and raw in only a few places while around her, the northern California night had been quiet. A little bit foggy around the edges. Pretty, even, especially with the sea foaming over the rocks down below.

  It hadn’t been until the car had burst into flames some ways down the cliff that she’d realized what had happened. How close she’d come to death. How narrowly she’d escaped it, completely by accident.

  Lily sat up too fast in her bed—again. This was, what? The fourth night in a row? Her heart was pounding so hard she thought it might punch a hole in her chest. The same way it had felt that night five years ago, when she’d finally comprehended what had happened. She’d almost forgotten the terror, all these years later. The insane what ifs that had galloped through her head. The smell of brake fluid and burned rubber and that thick, choking smoke from the fire so real in her nose she took a few deep breaths before she understood it was a memory.

  It had already happened. It wasn’t happening now.

  “It’s only a dream,” she whispered. “It isn’t real.”

  Though the shadow that detached itself from the darkness near her doorway then was. It moved, it made her jaw drop—and then it was Rafael.

  “What are you doing?” she gasped when she could speak, though she’d huddled up in a tiny ball against the ornate headboard. “You scared me!”

  “That is going around,” Rafael murmured.

  He looked rumpled and irritable and something else she couldn’t identify when he came to a stop beside her bed. She stared at him, the sight of his gorgeous body in nothing but a very low-riding pair of athletic trousers as soothing, oddly, as it was thrilling in the usual way. And his bare feet against the old carpet struck her as some kind of benediction.

  “Rafael?” she asked, before that fire in her took over and made her do or say something she knew she’d regret. “What’s the matter? What are you doing here?”

  “You screamed,” he said gruffly.

  She swallowed, and took the time to uncurl her hands so they were no longer balled into fists. She felt cold, even under all of her blankets. And because she couldn’t make sense of that—of his presence here. Had he come running?

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Lily.” There was none of that sharp politeness in his voice then. None of that mockery. And she couldn’t see so much as a trace of either one on his face when he moved to the bedside table and snapped on the light. “Don’t you think it’s time you told me what happened that night?”

  “That night?” she echoed, though she knew. Of course she knew. It was still reverberating in her head, still oozing around in the corners of the room. She frowned at him instead, because that was easier. “How did you hear me, anyway?”

  “I have a gift,” Rafael said, sounding dry and grumpy at once, which Lily realized was comforting, somehow. Though that made no sense. “I can hear two things with perfect clarity anywhere I go. The screams of terrified women, and irritating evasiveness at three twenty-seven in the morning.”

  He didn’t reach for her, as she’d half expected. He leaned against the side of the bed, crossed his arms while he fixed that dark gaze of his on her, and waited.

  And this was the story Lily had never told another living soul.

  Maybe, she thought now, because he was the only person on earth who might understand what had happened and what she’d done—and she wasn’t even sure about that. Not any longer.

  “Are you sure you want me to tell you?” she asked him. “You’ve really been enjoying vilifying me. I’d hate to ruin that for you.”

  His dark eyes grew sterner and his jaw tightened, but he didn’t say a word. He only waited—as if he could stand there all night, no matter what she threw at him.

  Lily sighed and shoved her hair back from her face, moving to sit cross-legged there at the head of the bed. And then she’d run out of ways to stall. And he was so dark and so beautiful, and he was so wrapped up inside her that she felt him when she breathed in, and she’d never managed to get him out of her head or her heart. Not then. Certainly not now.

  And she still didn’t know what that made her. What that meant.

  But it was the middle of the night. And the only light in the world seemed to fall in that tiny little circle from the side of her bed. She told herself it was the only confessional she’d be likely to get. And she took it.

  Maybe all of this—from the moment he’d seen her on the street in Charlottesville all the way across the world to that night in Venice—had been leading them straight here. Maybe this had been the destination all along.

  “You remember that last fight we had.” She looked at him, then down at her hands, threading them together in her lap. It had been a long time ago, that fight. “In San Francisco that Thursday.”

  His sensual mouth flattened into a stern line. “I remember.”

  “It was the usual thing. I cried, you laughed. There was that other woman you’d been in all the papers with. You dared me to leave you. I told you that this time I really would.” Lily frowned at her fingers as she lifted one shoulder, then dropped it. “I didn’t believe a word I said. Neither did you. We must have had that exact same fight a thousand times by then.”

  “More,” Rafael agreed in that same too-dark voice, and she thought that was self-loathing she heard in his voice then. She recognized it. She’d heard it enough times in her own voice during those years.

  “That weekend I went up to the château. It was a pretty night, I was bored and I was mad at you, so I helped myself to one of the overly fast cars in that absurd garage of your father’s, and I took it for a drive.” She lifted her head and looked at him. “I drove back down into the city. I wanted to see you.”

  She had the notion he was holding his breath. She pushed on.

  “You weren’t answering your phone, but I had a key to y
our house in Pacific Heights. I let myself in.” She let out a sound that even she knew wasn’t a laugh, but there was no helping it. This story was like an avalanche. Once it started, it rolled on and on until it wrecked everything. No wonder she’d never told it before. “I think I knew what was happening long before I made it to your bedroom. I don’t remember hearing any sounds, but I must have—”

  He swore. Deep and rich and inventively Italian.

  “—because when I made it to your bedroom and looked inside, I wasn’t as surprised as I should have been. If I hadn’t had some warning, I mean. If I’d been surprised, I would have done something more than simply stand there, don’t you think? Made a noise. Cried. Screamed. Something.” She shook her head. “But I didn’t.”

  “I don’t know if it makes it better or worse,” Rafael said after a moment, as if it hurt him. As if he was speaking with someone else’s voice, some stranger’s voice that hadn’t worked in years. “But I don’t even remember her name.”

  Lily remembered far too much. She’d stared at the figures on the bed, willing them to not make sense, the way such things always failed to make sense in books. To be some kind of hectic blur—that would have been a blessing.

  But she could see both of them, with perfect and horrifying clarity. She could still see both of them, burned forever into her brain.

  Rafael had been deep inside a stunning brunette, and both of them had been breathing hard, getting closer and closer to a big finish. Lily had felt almost clinical for a moment, looking at them, because she’d known exactly what it felt like when Rafael did precisely what he’d been doing to that woman, and yet she’d been seeing it from a completely different angle...

  The clinical thing hadn’t lasted. It had fallen away, hard, and when it had gone Lily had felt sick.

  “No,” she said now. “I don’t think that helps.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?” he asked, his voice rough. “Then. As you stood there.”

  She eyed him. “Like what?”

  He didn’t answer that. Because what could she have said? What was there to say in such situations? Lily turned her attention back to her hands. She forced them to open, then clenched them again.

  “It was one thing to know that you had other women. I always knew that. You didn’t exactly make a secret of it. You even brought them home with you. But it was different to see.”

  She stopped to take a breath, and thought he almost said something—but he didn’t. She hadn’t asked him for forgiveness, Lily reminded herself. Maybe he wouldn’t ask for any, either. Maybe there was no point bothering to apologize when wounds ran this deep. What was an apology between them, after all of this, but a pat little Band-Aid slapped over an amputated leg? What good would one do either one of them now?

  What good does any of this do? some voice inside her demanded, but she couldn’t stop now. She knew she couldn’t.

  “I didn’t know what to do, so I turned around and I left,” she told him. “As quietly as I’d come in. I walked out and stood there in front of your house. It was like an out-of-body experience. I kept thinking that at any moment, I’d start sobbing. That I would cry so hard and so long that it would rip me in half.” She looked at him then. “But I didn’t. I stood there a long time, but it never happened. So I got in the car again and I drove.”

  “Where were you going?” Rafael hardly sounded like himself, but Lily couldn’t let herself worry about that. Not now. “To find your friends?”

  “My friends hated you,” she said and watched him blink as he took that in. “Oh, they didn’t actually know it was you, but the secret man who always hurt me? They’d hated him for years. Openly. Any mention of you and it was all tough love and yelling. I didn’t bother calling any of them. I knew what they’d say.”

  She shifted position, pulling her knees up beneath her chin. Rafael didn’t move, standing there so still and so cold that Lily almost thought he’d turned himself into a statue.

  “I just drove,” she said. “Out of San Francisco and then out to the coast. I didn’t have a plan. I wasn’t sobbing or screaming or anything. I felt numb, really. But I knew what I was doing.” She found his gaze in the dimly lit room, and imagined hers was no less tortured than his was. “I wasn’t trying to hurt myself. You should know that.”

  “Then how did it happen?”

  Lily shrugged. “I was going too fast in a too-powerful car. I took a turn and there was a rock in the middle of the road. I swerved, and then I couldn’t correct it. I was skidding and there was nothing I could do about it.”

  She heard the brakes again, could hear her own swift curse so loud in the car’s interior, and she remembered that stunned moment when she’d realized she really wasn’t going to make it, she really wasn’t going to save herself—

  Lily shook it off and blew out a breath. “Then the car crashed. I don’t remember that part. Only that I knew I was going to die.” She swallowed, determined not to surrender to the emotion she could feel knocking around inside her. “But then I didn’t. I was lying on the ground, not dead. I still don’t know how.”

  “They think you went through the windshield,” Rafael said, clipped and low. “That was the theory. From what was left of the car.”

  “Oh.” She tried to picture it, but it made her feel dizzy again. Dizzy and fragile and entirely too breakable. “I guess that makes sense. I kind of came to on the shoulder, facedown in the dirt.”

  “You weren’t hurt?”

  He sounded so tense, she almost asked him if he was all right, but caught herself.

  “I was shaken up,” she told him. “I had some scrapes and was bleeding a little bit. The wind was knocked out of me. The bruises took a few days to really fully form and then a long time to fade.” She hugged her knees closer to her. “But I was fine. Alarmingly fine, I thought, when the car blew up.”

  “Alarmingly?”

  “I thought I was dead,” she said simply. He went still again. “It didn’t make sense that I was...fine. The car was...”

  “I know,” he said harshly, his face in stark lines. “I saw it. It was mangled beyond recognition.”

  “How could anyone survive that?” Lily asked. “But then, when I tried to stand up, I got sick. And I figured dead people didn’t throw up. I was pretty shaky.” She braced herself for this next part and couldn’t bring herself to look at him. She plucked at the blanket over her lap instead. “And then all I could think about was that I wanted you. I needed you.”

  She heard the sharp sound he made, but couldn’t let herself analyze it or slow down. “I’d passed that town not far back, so I decided to walk back there and find a phone. I thought if I heard your voice, it would all be okay.” Lily could still feel the heavy air that night, salt and wet, as the fog rolled in. She’d had dirt and blood in her mouth, and it had hurt a little bit to walk. But she’d kept going. “By the time I made it into town, the fire trucks were heading out. I don’t know why I didn’t flag them down. I think I was worried about the fact it was your father’s car? And I didn’t have permission to drive it. The whole walk to town, I kept thinking about how many hundreds of thousands of dollars I’d owe him and how I’d ever pay him back with a stupid degree in Anglo-Saxon elegies. It was on a loop in my head. I don’t think I was thinking straight.”

  Rafael muttered something in Italian then, ragged and something like savage. But Lily kept going.

  “I made it to a gas station and found a pay phone. Maybe the last working pay phone in California. And I picked it up to call you.” She mimed picking up the phone, and she didn’t know where that lump in her throat came from. That great pressure in her chest. She looked at him. She dropped her hand. “But what would have been the point?”

  “Lily,” he said, as if her name hurt him. He rubbed a hand over his jaw. But he didn’t argue.

  “
Nothing was going to change,” she said, almost as if he’d argued after all. He sat down hard on the end of the bed, then. His too-dark eyes were a torment, his mouth twisted, but she didn’t look away. “It was this moment of awful clarity. You were in bed with that woman, but she could have been any woman and it could have been any given night. It didn’t matter. It had been years and it was still the same. It wasn’t going to change. We weren’t going to change. And it was killing me, Rafael. It was killing me.”

  They sat there, separated by the length of the mattress and all of their history, for so long that if the sun had come up outside her windows Lily wouldn’t have been at all surprised. But it was still dark when Rafael shifted position again. It was still dark when he cleared his throat.

  And it told Lily everything she needed to know about how little she’d changed in all this time that she would have given absolutely anything to know what he was thinking then. She didn’t even have the strength to call herself pathetic. It was simply that same old madness, all these years later. It was all the proof she needed that nothing was different. Herself least of all.

  “What did you do then?” he asked.

  “I told a nice Canadian couple at the gas station that my abusive boyfriend had left me there after a fight. They were so nice, they drove me all the way to Portland, Oregon, to get me away from him. When they kept going toward Vancouver, they left me at the bus station with cash and a ticket for my aunt’s place in Texas.”

  “You don’t have an aunt in Texas.” His gaze moved over her face. “You don’t have an aunt.”

  “No,” she agreed. “But that was no reason not to go to Texas. So that was what I did. And then it was a week later, and everyone thought I was dead. No one even looked for me. So I decided I might as well stay dead.”

  “But you were pregnant.”

  She nodded. “Yes, though I didn’t know that then.”

  “If you had?”

  She wanted to lie to him, but didn’t. “I don’t know.”

  Rafael nodded once. Harshly, as if it hurt him. “And when you discovered that you were pregnant, it didn’t occur to you a woman on the run, presumed dead, might not be the best parental figure for a child?”