I look down at my dress.
“Not your dress,” she says. “Your face. You look like a nervous wreck. Your eyes are all bloodshot and you look like you haven’t slept for days. You have dark circles like whoa.”
Now I feel like crying. “I haven’t slept well lately,” I say meekly.
“I know,” she says and puts her arm around me, giving me a quick hug. “You deserve all the sleep in the world. You are working so hard and doing so much. I just don’t want anyone to take advantage of you. Maybe I’m just all fired up because of me and Danny, so just take what I’m saying with a grain of salt. You know for the last month, he didn’t work at all? He was just coasting along on my paycheck, like he used to do.” She sighs heavily. “Men are rat bastards. But we love them anyway, don’t we?”
She raises her glass to me and I halfheartedly toast her with my empty glass.
Derio isn’t a rat bastard. And I do love him. A lot. A terrible amount.
But after Shay’s words, my heart feels underwater.
Because what if love isn’t enough?
* * *
When Derio comes back the next afternoon, I don’t even hear him until he’s right behind me. I’m still reeling over what happened moments earlier, my heart racing and my eyes on the edge of tears.
“Amber?” he says softly. “Didn’t you hear me come in?”
I don’t move or speak. I just stare blankly in front of me and try to breathe.
He sits down beside me on the living room couch and puts his hand on my knee.
“What is wrong? I’m here now,” he whispers.
I slowly turn my head to look at him, blinking. Outside the sun is shining, the fog blown away by a strong breeze. The same breeze snakes in through the open door to the patio and ruffles the thick hair off his forehead.
“I had a fight,” I say emptily. “With the twins.”
He frowns and holds on to my hand. My other one is holding a wineglass, filled to the brim. “Oh? What happened?”
I take in a deep breath and put down the wine. “Alfonso got in a fight at school with another boy. Apparently the boy had called him gay or a girl or something like that because he hangs around his sister all the time. So Alfonso hit him.” I look at Derio, suddenly angry that he wasn’t there to help me when he should have been. “Do you know what that was like for me? The teacher called me in and I had to go. Hardly anyone spoke English. The other parents were yelling at me about Alfonso. It was horrible! And embarrassing! And I couldn’t fucking do a thing about it!”
Derio’s eyes widen at my screeching, dumbfounded by my outburst. But fuck him, he wasn’t there, he didn’t have to go through it. It was so fucking humiliating being called in there like that when I couldn’t even understand what the headmaster was saying over the phone.
Derio tries to hug me but I break away from his grasp and stand up. I’m not done yet.
“So I have to bring him home early and then drag him with me back to school to pick up Annabella. Of course that caused even more problems with the parents, who thought I was bringing him back to gloat or something. So they started yelling at me in the streets.”
Derio shoots to his feet now, his eyes flashing with anger. “Who are the parents? Who is the kid? They can’t treat you like that.”
“Well, they did!” I retort. “And I don’t know, go talk to Alfonso, he’s your brother, not mine.”
He blinks at me and I continue. “And then Annabella starts acting up. I told her not to use the iPad to talk to Gia and she starts using it anyway, right in front of me. So I take it away from her. Then she tells me that she hates me and she won’t listen to me because I’m not her mother.” I pause, taking in a deep breath. “And I’ll never be her mother.”
Derio’s heart looks like it’s been shattered. “I am so sorry,” he says heavily, trying to pull me close to him. I let him wrap his arms around me but I don’t hug him back. I don’t need his comfort right now. I need him to make this all right. I am so angry it feels like I’ve drunk a vat of acid and it’s eating me alive. It’s a dangerous kind of anger, the kind that takes years off your life.
He should have been here. He should be here helping me. These aren’t my kids, Annabella is right, and I know that. I don’t know what I’m doing. I shouldn’t be doing this at all.
Tears spring to my eyes and everything inside me hurts. “I’m going to take a nap. You take care of them now.”
“I will. I will speak to them and let them know how important you are, how wonderful—”