Page 208 of Modern Romance October 2025 5-8
He grunted, still not sure he was capable of more than a single syllable response.
‘So, yourNonna. What should I call her?’
‘Allegra,’ he said, glad he didn’t sound like the swirling darkness that was still inside of him, even as he tried to control it.
‘What did Jamie call her?’
He sat up straighter, instantly uncomfortable. If imagining Charlotte with another man was unpleasant, hearing her refer to his ex-wife was even more so. ‘Nonna. But they’d known each other a long time.’
Her features did something funny. Something slightly resembling the whirlpool inside of him, before she smiled serenely and reached for her coffee cup.
‘How did you meet?’
‘MyNonna? I imagine shortly after my birth,’ he said, deliberately misunderstanding.
‘You and Jamie.’
He hesitated. ‘My grandmother isn’t going to ask you that.’
‘I’m asking.’
His stomach tightened in an unmistakable warning sign.Do not answer. They weren’t going to do this. Questions for the sake of thoroughness were one thing, but he had no intention of opening this particular door. But then again, it was a simple enough question. It was probably somewhere on the internet, in one of the pieces that had been written up when they’d gotten married.
‘At an art gallery opening.’
Charlotte nodded thoughtfully. ‘She’s an artist?’
He shook his head.
‘A patron of the arts?’
‘She was a waitress.’ He told himself to stop talking, but somehow found himself saying, ‘Some guy kept hitting on her. He’d had too much to drink, wouldn’t take no for an answer. Jamie ended up pressing her tray—filled with dainty little egg and caviar cups—at his chest. She got fired. I intervened.’
Charlotte’s eyes widened but otherwise her features were unreadable. A perfectly controlled mask of casual interest, as befitted their perfectly casual interest in one another.
‘And you fell in love?’
Again, he hesitated. ‘Yes.’
He saw the way her brow beetled, the question in her eyes, and he felt an answering question inside his chest. He had loved Jamie. He’d cared for her, immensely, and he’d known she needed him—ever since that first night. What was that, if not love?
‘I was young,’ he heard himself say, remembering that night. ‘And she was so different to anyone I’d ever known. Right away, I felt as though I needed to protect her. To keep her safe.’ The word ‘safe’ sat in his throat like a boulder, because it was something he’d thought about for a long time. Why hadn’t he been able to keep his parents safe? His grandfather? Why hadn’t he somehow protected them from the accident? Why couldn’t he go back in time and fix everything? He blanked the unsettling thoughts, frowning as he kept speaking. ‘There was such a vulnerability to her. A raw realness that I’d never seen. I mean, all the girls I went to school with were so polished and confident, so sure of themselves and their place in the world. Sometimes, I felt like Jamie was walking around without a clue where she was going.’ He feigned a shrug, but everything felt stiff and heavy. ‘She was alone in the world. Orphaned, like me, but noNonnato take her in. We had a lot in common on that front.’
‘That explains why she and your grandmother were so close,’ Charlotte said gently.
He clammed up. He had to.
Because if he didn’t, he’d start talking about why having a family mattered so damned much to Jamie. Why she couldn’t just let the idea go. Why it had almost driven her mad, the desperate need to conceive and to hold their baby in her arms. Why she’d needed, more than anything, to feel that she belonged to a family, not just a partnership.
He felt his jaw tick as he turned away and looked out of the window. The seatbelt sign had been switched off right before the steward had appeared with morning tea and Dante took advantage of that now, unfastening his belt and standing abruptly.
‘Excuse me, I’m going to check in with the flight deck.’
Charlotte didn’t turn to watch him go, even though she was very, very tempted. And confused.
And...something else. Something she knew better than to think about, because it was part of the emotional toolkit she kept buried way, way down in the back of her brain. It was a part of her she wasn’t even sure she had access to. She’d cut off the blood supply so long ago, for her own sake.
Because she wasn’t going to turn into her mother.
