“You knew this was how tonight would end,” he said slowly.
“I’ve tried everything I can to help heal you. But if you don’t want to be healed, there’s nothing I can do. Loving you isn’t enough. I can’t love you if you won’t love yourself.”
He stared at her, feeling numb.
She took a deep breath, trying to smile. “Our baby will have your name when she’s born. You can see her anytime you want, no matter what the post-nup says.”
“Hana,” he choked out.
Her beautiful eyes were luminous in the shadows of their bedroom, as if her heart was breaking. “Goodbye, Antonio.”
She left without looking back.
* * *
There was a flash of lightning outside the bedroom’s windows. Antonio felt numb. As thunder rumbled across the sky a moment later, he felt a gut-wrenching pain.
How could Hana leave him? She had no right. He would not allow it. She was his.
And yet...he felt a strange trickle down his spine. His body was reacting strangely. Beneath the anger, he felt pain, yes. But also, buried in the cracks, another feeling he couldn’t understand. One that made no sense. Relief.
Finally.
He’d always known this would happen. Even in their happiest moments. Even when he’d been making love to her on a pink sand Caribbean beach on their honeymoon, part of him had always known he’d lose her. No, even before that. On their wedding day in Tokyo, when Ren Tanaka had told him he wasn’t worthy of his bride. And someday soon, Hana will know it, too.
That day had finally come.
His eyes fell on the end table. All he could see, all he could feel, was the small paper that Hana had left there. His mother’s address. Her phone number. The answers to everything he’d feared most.
Turning, he fled the room.
Antonio went downstairs to his study to try to work, but he couldn’t concentrate on his laptop. Words and figures swam incomprehensibly in front of his eyes. He thought of how he’d judged Horace Lund so harshly at the restaurant in New York, and wondered if he himself would soon be muttering wild-eyed over cannoli about the woman he’d lost.
He hadn’t lost Hana to a yoga instructor. Not even to Tanaka, who though he still hated him, Antonio grudgingly had to admit he had a certain unwilling respect for.
No. Antonio had lost her on his own. Because of his fear to learn the truth about his own darkest flaws.
Pushing his laptop aside in disgust, he left the study and went down the hall, nearly walking into an antique suit of armor. That was what Hana deserved, he thought. A knight in shining armor. A man who wasn’t so deeply cracked at the core.
Going back to his bedroom, he yanked off the business suit he’d worn flying across the Atlantic, back when he’d thought he could still save their marriage. He put on exercise shorts, gym shoes and a thin T-shirt that stretched across his hard-muscled chest, then went back downstairs, past the kitchen, where he could hear Manuelita talking to her assistant and pounding the dough for bread. Going down the hall to his home gym, he turned on the light.
The gym was empty, gleaming, pristine. He pushed a button that lifted the automated blinds, filling the room with weak gray light.
I know the reason you were left on those church steps the day you were born.
Guzzling down some water from the cooler, he climbed on the treadmill. He set the speed faster and faster, trying to outrun his thoughts.
There’s not much time left. Your mother’s sick. Dying...
Going to the punching bag, he hit it without gloves. Once. Twice. He pounded it until his knuckles were raw.
I’ve tried everything I can to help heal you. But if you don’t want to be healed, there’s nothing I can do.
Antonio fell against the punching bag, wrapping his arms around it as his knees swayed beneath him.
Loving you isn’t enough. I can’t love you if you won’t love yourself.
“Stop,” he whispered aloud.