I ask if she’s warm enough; she ignores me.
The traffic is light. It’s a frigid Sunday, the kind you long to spend in bed. The radio is turned on, the volume low. Mia lies down in the backseat and, in time, she falls asleep. I watch the clumsy hair fall across her rosy cheeks, numb still from the winter air. Her eyes flutter, her body asleep while images fill her mind. I try to make sense of it all: how someone like Mia could fall for someone like Colin Thatcher.
And then my eyes wander to the man sitting beside me, a man so unlike James it’s almost comical.
“I’m leaving him,” I disclose, my eyes never rising from the road ahead. Gabe says nothing. But when his hand closes over mine, he says everything he needs to say.
Gabe drops us off at the door. He offers to help us up, but I decline, telling him we can manage.
Mia is making her way inside the building without me. In silence, we watch her go. Gabe says that he’ll be back in the morning. He has something for her.
And then, when the heavy door closes and she is no longer in view, he leans in to kiss me, altogether ignoring the commuters who walk home along the busy sidewalks, the cabs passing by on the boisterous street. I place my hands on his chest and stop him. “I can’t,” I say. This pains me more than it will Gabe and I watch as he studies me for an explanation, his soft eyes wondering why, and then gradually he begins to nod. It has nothing to do with him. But it’s time to get my priorities in order. They’ve been out of sync for so long.
*
Mia tells me that there is the sound of breaking glass. She watches him struggle for breath. There’s blood, everywhere, as he reaches out his hands and she can do nothing but watch him fall.
She wakes up in her own bed, screaming. By the time I make my way in, she’s fallen from the bed and to the floor, poised above someone who isn’t there. She whispers his name. “Please don’t leave me,” she says, and then proceeds to tear apart the bedding, looking for him. She tosses aside the blanket and rips sheets from the bed. “Owen,” she cries. And then she pushes past me where I’m standing in the doorway watching the heartbreaking scene, barely making it to the toilet before she throws up.
It’s like this every day.
Some days the morning sickness isn’t so bad. But those days, Mia says, are the hardest. When she’s not preoccupied with the constant sense of nausea, then she’s constantly reminded that Owen is dead.
I hover in the doorway. “Mia,” I say. I’m willing to do anything to make the pain go away. But there’s nothing I can do.
When she’s ready, she tells me about the last moments inside the cabin, the way the gunshots sounded like fireworks, the way the window broke, glass shattering to the floor, the winter air welcoming itself in. “The noise terrified me, my eyes darting outside before I heard Owen begin to wheeze. He whispered my name. Chloe. He struggled to come up with enough breath. His legs began to collapse. I didn’t know what had happened,” she cries, shaking her head, reliving the moment as she does a hundred times a day in her head, and I lay a hand on her leg to stop her. There’s no need to go on. But she does. She does because she has to, because her mind can no longer keep the flashbacks contained. They lay dormant in her mind, like a volcano about to burst.
“Owen?” she utters aloud, trapped in a moment that isn’t the present time. “The gun dropped from his hands. It dented the floor. He reached his hands out to me. There was blood, everywhere. He’d been shot. His legs began to give. I tried to catch him, I did, but the weight was too much. He crumbled to the floor.
“I fell to him. ‘Owen! Oh, my God. Owen,’” she sobs.
She says that she envisioned the jagged coastline of the Italian Riviera. In that last moment, that’s what she saw. The boats floating lazily in the Ligurian Sea, and the abrupt peaks of the Maritime Alps and the Apennines Mountains. She saw a rustic stone cottage lost in the hillside, where they toiled in the lush green countryside until their backs broke. She and the man known as Owen. She imagined that they were no longer on the run. They were home. In that last moment, Mia saw children running through the thick grass, dodging between rows of unvarying grape trees. They had dark hair like his and dark eyes like his and they inserted Italian words into their departing English. Bambino and allegro and vero amore.