Page 85 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
Does he still believe this?
I know it’s because of his father. His father brainwashed him. Clearly from the earliest age, his father had been manipulating him, shaping his mind, shaping his view of the world.
His father controlled him.
“Dragos, you know that a woman doesn’t deserve to be murdered, not for any reason.”
The silence between us has a pulse of its own.
“Yes, I know,” he says, his voice harsh, sharp like a dagger. “I know,” he says.
“Your mother didn’t deserve that. Your father is a monster.”
“I know that too,” he says, his words sharp. “I do know. I didn’t. I… I didn’t for so long. He told me. He built my entire world. How could I ever look at it and say that it was false?”
And suddenly I realize something I never have before. Dragos doesn’t live in the same world that I do, and it isn’t because he’s a billionaire. It isn’t because he has money and privilege. It’s because his world was shaped by something altogether broken. And whatever I’ve believed about him is wrong, because I made assumptions about the fact that we must have some shared morals. A shared idea of what love is. Of what marriage looks like. But he grew up in a home with a maniac who convinced his son that his mother deserved to die.
“You’ve never harmed me. You’ve never made me feel unsafe physically.”
“That isn’t true,” he says, his voice rough. “You were afraid of me when I came for you in Paris. What if I did intend to hurt you? How would either of us know?”
“I don’t believe that you did. I don’t believe for one moment that you intended to harm me when you came after me. I think you were angry, and I think you wanted me back in your possession. But hurting me wouldn’t get you what you wanted.”
“How could I have ever thought my father was justified?”
“I’m trying to figure out how to say what I want to say. Without sounding… Without sounding like I believe you’re beyond hope, because I don’t think you are. But there’s an old song about a wise man who built his house upon the rock, and a foolish man who built his house upon the sand. Your house was built upon something else altogether. Something broken. Something destined to make a person… Fall to pieces eventually. Or…”
“Become a psychopath?”
“Maybe. I had thought that our foundations were the same. I knew that you didn’t seem to have a relationship with either of your parents, I think I assumed they had passed away. But it never occurred to me that you had grown up in a house like that. So broken. So damaged. I just never even thought for one moment… It’s making me reevaluate.”
“Reevaluate what?”
I look down at my hands. I miss my wedding ring for the first time. Not just because I wish I had something to play with to distract myself, but because it was part of what bonded us together.
I’ve done a good job of reducing us to sex. But it has always been more than that. We’re husband and wife. And yes, our attraction was a key part of that. It always has been. That instant attraction we felt at first meeting, the way we couldn’t stay apart after.
It’s why I married a relative stranger. But he did too.
He was caught up in that same sweep of inevitable fate I had been caught up in.
He still has his ring on his finger. I reach over and I put my hand over his, the metal of his wedding band warm under my palm.
I’m the one who decided it meant nothing to him, because he wasn’t showing me affection the way I expected to see it.
I’m the one who decided he might have violated his vows, when there was no evidence beyond his emotional distance.
Now, looking at reasons why, at the origins of who he is, I feel like I’m the one who failed.
“I expected you to behave like a man who grew up with two functional parents,” I say, slowly. “I expected you to see marriage the same way that I did based on how I grew up. With my two functional good parents. But that’s a completely unrealistic expectation for someone who grew up under threat of violence. For someone who grew up believing that abuse was normal.”
“I know better now,” he says.
“I know that. You never hurt me.”
“I neverwantedto.”
He says this with a great degree of authority. He says this in such a way that makes me believe him.
