Page 72 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
“I think you’re perfectly yourself.”
There’s a haunted look about him when he makes eye contact with me. “I am sorry, then. Sorry that this is who I am.”
“I chose you,” I say.
This is the fundamentally difficult part about all of this. “I’m really angry at you. I have been. But the further I drill down into all of it, the more I realize I’m angry at myself too. I married you without knowing you. I realized that what we had wasn’t enough for me, but it was exactly what you gave me when we were first together. I’m the one who changed the rules.”
I feel disloyal to myself admitting this. Because it is true, but I also feel like my anger at him is justified. I also feel that I’m owed my outrage. My hurt. My heartbreak. I do feel sorry for the twenty-year-old who met him and thought she had won some kind of lottery. Who thought that love was going to be that easy. That desire was simply a magical thing she could get carried away on.
“What were the rules?” he asks me.
“Don’t you want to open the box first?”
He considers this, and then he sits down on the bed next to the box. “First, tell me the rules.”
“It was nothing quite that structured.” I look at him and I feel the first squeeze of pity that I felt the entire time. He genuinely doesn’t know who he is. He’s genuinely lost. He doesn’t know what happened between us. He doesn’t remember any of the unkind things that he said to me. He doesn’t know who tried to kill him tonight.
He isn’t the architect of our disaster. Or maybe he is. Answering that question requires me to grapple with questions I really don’t know the answers to. Are we our memories? Is he even Dragos without them?
Is he someone innocent now?
Is he the man I love?
I remember that moment of violence on his face, and I know for certain that he is. In a way that terrifies me.
Because the violence in him does not repulse me as it should. I didn’t fall for him in spite of the edge of danger. No. I rather fear that I fell for him partlybecauseof it. That part of me wanted a love that would hurt. That would skim too close to my bones.
It made me feel alive in a way nothing else did. When school and art and the rest of my life was perfection and hard work and contorting myself to be the very best.
Not with him.
He said we liked it rough, and he’s right. It always has an edge. It always has. I marvel at that, and wonder for the first time about my own part in that, and why I wanted it so very badly.
But none of that is an answer to his question.
“It became clear to me very early that you didn’t want to answer too many questions about yourself. That there were certain things that were off-limits to me. Aspects of your business. I’m not stupid, you’re a very rich man, and I definitely wondered if some of it was… Not aboveboard. But everything was good between us, so I didn’t see the point of questioning it. Not too deeply. That was one of the rules. If I ask a question, and you don’t answer it, that means don’t ask again. It means you weren’t going to answer. You also never liked to share details about your childhood. About your parents.”
He nods slowly. “I don’t remember them. Do you know where I grew up in Romania?”
“Yes. We went there. You don’t live in your family home, but you do still own it. We had our wedding in a church nearby.”
“What was it like?”
“It was a large estate. Very old. You said that it had been in your family for years. You said that one day our children…”
He frowns. “I said we would have children?”
I look away from him and stare at the wall as a crushing sensation in my chest makes it hard for me to believe. “Sometimes I wonder if both of us were living in a fantasy. Sometimes I wonder if you thought you wanted something that later you couldn’t actually take hold of.”
Those words settle between us. Hard and sharp.
He touches the box, and opens it. The first thing he takes out is a photograph. It’s of him as a boy. I know, because it looks so much like him. The man beside him must be his father. He’s tall and imposing, handsome and stern. He looks so much like Dragos it’s startling. The woman on the other side of him must be his mother. He looks nothing like her. She is beautiful and tall, far too thin. There is a deep unhappiness embedded in the smile she is giving to the camera. And I feel instantly like I understand her better than I would like to.
His face is frozen, a mask of shock.
“These are my parents,” he says.
“I think so,” I say, my voice thin, choked.
