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She falls silent for a couple of seconds.
“Why not?”
I sigh, my hands tightening around the wheel. “I need to go to Russia this weekend. There’s some urgent business I have to attend to. I’m sorry, sweetheart. You know I wouldn’t go if it wasn’t important.”
Aurora inhales softly. “Okay,” she nods. “It’s fine. Lucia will be disappointed, but I guess the both of us can just have fun together.”
“I’m sorry, mi vida.”
When I glance at her, she doesn’t look overly upset, which I’m glad for. Because she’s about to be.
“Who are the flowers for?” she questions.
“I was going to go to the cemetery, to see my parents. And Valerio,” I add after a second’s hesitation.
When Dominic mentioned him earlier, I realized I hadn’t been doing a good job of preserving his memory. I haven’t been to his grave once since he was buried. Mostly because I knew if he was watching right now, he would not approve of my relationship with his daughter. Or maybe he would if he could see how much she loved me. I can certainly feel it. The only problem is that I have no assurance of her feelings and she hasn’t been able to say anything about them to me. Aurora tenses at the mention of her father.
“Okay,” she says softly. “You can drop me off at home.”
“You should come with me.”
“No, thank you.”
“Aurora, it’s been months since he died. And you still haven’t gotten closure.”
She faces forward in the car, tension in her posture. “Nico, I don’t want to talk about this right now.”
“Baby, you can’t keep avoiding things that hurt. It’s not healthy.”
“I really don’t want to go, Nicolas.”
The desperation in her voice tugs at my chest. So, I decide to listen. I drive us home and I even go inside with her because it doesn’t feel right to visit our parents without her by my side. Her mother’s there too. Coincidentally, she was buried at the same graveyard my parents were interred at. And when Valerio died, it was only right for him to be there with his wife. They’re all in the same place. Some would call that fate. I call it an interwoven tragedy that managed to bring two people together who care about one another.
We both head up to our bedroom and she immediately starts taking off her jacket. I stop her, grabbing her hand and leading her to the bed. We both take a seat as I decide to reach her in the only way I know how.
“Nico, please let it go,” she says when she notices the expression on my face.
“No. I want you to listen to me. You remember how my parents died?”
She’s confused by the change in subject, but she does manage a nod. “You said it was a car accident.”
“Yeah. They passed away when I was nine. A car crash. Funny, isn’t it? How the most mundane things can manage to throw off the course of a person’s life forever? When you asked all those years ago, I think a part of me was ashamed to tell you the truth. Because I blamed myself for what happened.”
She sucks in a soft breath at that. But she doesn’t speak, so I continue.
“They were bringing me home from school when I asked to be taken to the amusement park. It was completely stupid. We’d all had a long day, and I knew they were tired from work, yet I insisted on going to that damn park. And they took me there. I wish they hadn’t. We played, we had fun, and on our way back home, as we were driving across an intersection, we were hit by a drunk driver. My parents died. I survived.”
It still hurts. Twenty years later and the memory of that day still hurts. I used to see it every time I closed my eyes. It was like a demon plaguing me. I would hear my own voice in my head constantly blaming me for what happened. Then slowly, the voices started to grow quiet. And now I don’t even hear them anymore. And it’s all thanks to Aurora. She has no idea how much she’s done for me. How much she saved me from. Now I’ve got to be the one to do the same for her.
She looks at me like she can feel every single thing I’m feeling. Who knows. Maybe she can. I could certainly feel all her pain ten years ago. I wished I could have taken it all away. I should have tried harder to do so.
“What happened to the drunk driver?” Aurora asks.
My jaw clenches at that. “He also survived. He was driving a truck that night, so our car took most of the impact.”
Aurora’s discerning brown eyes land on my face. She can tell there’s more.
“Where is he now?”
