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Now that it had finally happened, she realized she’d always known this was how it would end. She would love him; he would leave her. And yet part of her still couldn’t believe it. “But you’re the one who wanted us to be a family. I was marrying someone else! You interrupted my wedding and wouldn’t take no for an answer!”
Head bowed, Theo stood silently next to the bed, hands in his trouser pockets, black shirt only half-buttoned. His hard face was shadowed by the lamplight. “I know.”
“Just because I said I loved you?” she cried. The baby woke and started to whimper. She felt like whimpering, too.
Theo took a breath, started to say something, then just shook his head. “It’s more than that.”
“Then, why? Tell me why!”
Theo’s eyes were bleak. “What do I know about being a father?” He turned toward his distorted reflection in the window. “My father died when I was a few months old. My mother told me he overdosed on pills, trying to sleep over my crying.”
Emmie sucked in her breath. “Shetoldyou that?”
His lips curled. “She was trying to explain why being a parent was so hard. Love was hard for her, too. There was a parade of men through my childhood. She shared drugs with them and fell madly in love.” His voice held no emotion. “There was a different man every few months, some of whom she married, none of them very good, often stoned or drunk or stealing her money. And then...”
“Then?”
His dark eyes shadowed. “When I was ten, she met Panos Papadopolous. He was older, and rich. She said she’d met her soulmate who’d take care of her forever. He proposed to her the night they met, and we moved to his ancestral home on Lyra. My mother returned from the honeymoon with two things—a black eye and my sister in her belly.”
“What happened?”
He shrugged, twisting the gold band on his left hand. “They fell into a pattern. He’d get mad and smack her around. They’d do drugs together, and he’d graciously forgive her. After Sofia was born, it was worse. Whenever he felt upset about his failing business, or someone disrespected him, or he was worried about his dwindling family fortune, he dealt with it by beating my mother. Just because he could.” Looking down, he said in a low voice, “That’s what love means to me. Either kicking someone when they’re down. Or being the victim on the ground.”
Emmie’s heart was pounding. Her family life had been chaotic and stressful sometimes, with five children, a sick mother and bills not always paid. But never abusive. Never that. She’d always known her family loved her. “It’s horrible. How did you get out?”
“When I tried to protect my mother, he’d beat me, too. Until I became taller than he was. One day, when he punched me, I punched back. We nearly killed each other. I begged my mother to grab my sister and leave, but she wouldn’t. She said she couldn’t survive on the street with two children and no husband. So she sent me off to a boarding school in England. A school for problem boys. Not to protect me.” His lip twisted in a sneer. “To protecthim.”
“Theo...” she breathed, agonized.
He paced across the hospital room’s linoleum floor, looking back blindly at the dark window faintly smeared with the lights of Midtown Manhattan.
“I came home from school the summer I was fifteen and found my mother in the hospital with two black eyes and a purple bruise around her neck. He’d gotten notice from the bank that they were foreclosing on the house, so he’d decided to strangle her. And I saw Sofia...” He closed his eyes.
She felt a chill. “What?”
“With me away at school and my mother in the hospital, Sofia was the only one left for him to hurt. I found her hiding in her bedroom closet. He’d wanted money for drugs so he’d demanded her gold locket. Sofia loved that locket. She hugged it whenever our mother was gone because it had her picture inside it. But Panos screamed threats about beating her black and blue and ripped it out of her hand. She was quivering, hiding from him in the dark. She was five years old.”
“Oh, no...” Emmie looked down at her sleeping baby and wondered how any parent could hurt their own child.
Theo set his jaw. “Panos had left to find his supplier, so I took Sofia to stay with neighbors in the village. When I returned, I found him high as a kite, smoking and frying honey fritters on the stove. I told him I was taking my mother and sister away for good and if he tried to follow us, I’d kill him.”
“What did he do?”
“He screamed insults and threats. When I didn’t back down, he picked up the pan of burning oil and threw it at me. I ducked.” He glanced down toward his ankle. “Mostly.”
“Your scar,” she breathed. “It didn’t come from an engine fire in a car race.”
“No.” He gave a grim smile. “I dodged the pan then punched him in the mouth. His cigarette fell into the spilled cooking oil and started to burn. Panos grabbed a kitchen knife and lunged at me. But he slipped and fell. Either the fall knocked him out or the drugs did. I don’t know. But when I tried to lift him, to drag him out, I couldn’t. He was twice my weight—”
“You tried to save him?” Emmie said, astounded.
He shook his head. “The kitchen filled with smoke, and I could feel the heat burning my skin. I couldn’t budge him off the floor. So I turned and ran. I left him to die, Emmie.”
“Good. The man got what he deserved,” she replied vengefully. He blinked at her vehemence. Looking down at her own baby, who’d fallen back to sleep, she said, “You have nothing to feel guilty about.”
His jaw was tight as he looked down at his hands. “Don’t I?”
“It’s over now, Theo,” she tried again. “It’s all over.”
