But he wasn’t asking her to go home with him, was he? He was giving her—them—a way out.
And she knew why.
Every time he looked at her he would be reminded of the loss of yet another child.
And every time she looked at him her loss would double.
He’d loved their baby, not her.
She’d loved them both.
‘I need to sleep,’ she whispered, disentangling her hand and carefully turning onto her side, not quite turning her back to him.
She could hear his breaths. They sounded heavy. Raspy.
‘So you’re going to go with Grace?’
She nodded, utterly unable to speak.
It was only when she heard the door shut that the dryness inside her welled to a peak and the tears fell, saturating the pillow.
Incoherent with grief, she was unaware of the needle that was inserted into her arm to sedate her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘ARE YOU SURE you want to do this?’ Grace asked as the driver pulled up outside Pepe’s Parisian home.
Cara nodded absently, gazing at the place she had called home. The place where she had spent the happiest months of her life. The place where the man she loved was holed up, alone.
‘You don’t have to do this.’
Cara attempted a smile. ‘I know that. I want to.’ How puny a word want sounded when describing the desperate yearning that lived inside her to be with him.
But Grace was right. She didn’t have to do this. She could get on the jet that was waiting for them and fly off to Rome. The world would still turn. In time she would heal.
But her heart wouldn’t. Without Pepe she doubted she would ever feel whole again.
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come in with you?’
Cara shook her head. ‘No. I need to do this alone. I want to say goodbye to him properly.’ At the graveside Pepe had looked desolate. She’d had Grace on her arm, holding her up. He’d stood apart from them all, shunning even his brother.
She needed to satisfy herself that he was holding up.
Who was taking care of him? she wondered. His mother was in Sicily taking care of Lily. His brother was already en route back to Sicily, having returned for the funeral. Pepe had rejected his attempts to stay with him, assuring both Luca and Grace that he was perfectly all right, and throwing himself into his work.
But he wasn’t all right. He couldn’t be. The few conversations they’d had to discuss the funeral arrangements had been almost too painful to recall. He’d sounded empty.
His friends, as lovely as she’d come to accept most of them were, were too wrapped up in their own lives to see beyond the tragedy of what had happened between them on anything but a superficial level. And now that the funeral was over, she suspected those that had been there for him thus far—if he’d even let them be there for him, which she doubted—would fall by the wayside.