Chapter 2

When I first married Lucien, I once ate a pistachio truffle without knowing what was in it.

My throat began to close before I finished chewing. He spent the night beside my bed, furious with the kitchen, the doctor, and himself. After that, pistachios vanished from the house.

So when dessert was set in front of me that night, I noticed it at once.

A small green-glazed cake. Pistachio cream. Crushed nuts at the edge.

Celeste looked at it and blinked.

“Oh,” she said lightly. “I thought she’d asked for it.”

Lucien did not even look up. He was pouring Matteo water.

“If you asked for it,” he said, “eat it.”

I picked up my fork.

At St. Dymphna, refusal was never treated as preference. If I pushed away a plate, they wrote me up for defiance. If I left food untouched, I lost heat, sleep, or the next meal. If I argued, they called it resistance and began the evening again from the start.

So I stopped refusing.

I took a bite.

Then another.

The taste turned bitter almost at once. My mouth began to itch. Heat crept up my throat.

By the time Lucien looked over, I had eaten half.

He swore, knocked the plate away, and caught my face between his hands.

“Serena. Are you out of your mind?”

I could already feel my breathing tighten.

“I thought,” I said, trying to swallow past the swelling, “that refusing would make things worse.”

He stared at me.

For a second, he looked less angry than shaken.

Then he got me to the car and drove like a man being hunted.

I remember pieces of the clinic. White lights. Leather under my cheek. His hand at the back of my neck. His voice, too rough, saying my name again and again.

Years ago, when I almost died from the first reaction, he had held me like that too.

Back then, I thought fear and love were the same thing.

Later, the residence taught me otherwise.

Half-awake, I heard him speaking to the physician, then to someone else on the phone.

“What did you do to her?” he asked. “What exactly happens in that place?”

The answer came back smooth and professional.

“Mr. Varelli, this is not unusual,Patients with Serena’s history often become highly adaptive. They learn very quickly which behaviors draw sympathy, alarm, or attention from authority figures.”

I nearly laughed.

If this was performance, then I had become very good at it.

By the following evening, I was stable enough to be brought home.

The swelling had gone down. The rash had not. I knew I looked thin and worn and not at all like the woman Lucien had once shown off at charity dinners.

I had barely crossed the hall when Matteo came running toward me.

He stopped just in front of me and looked up at the marks on my throat.

“Does it hurt?”

“No,” I said.

At the residence, I learned to say that about almost everything.

He came closer, warm and small, the picture of trust.

Then he rose on his toes and whispered into my ear.

“Mama cried because you came back.”

I went still.

He kept speaking in that same soft voice.

“She said everything was peaceful before you. She said you ruin things.”

He took my hand.

“Come see something.”

He led me through the conservatory to the long reflecting pool near the windows. A small silver toy boat floated near the center.

“I dropped it,” he said. “Can you get it?”

Before I could answer, he climbed onto the stone ledge.

“Matteo, get down.”

He looked back at me, smiled, and leaned too far.

I moved without thinking.

I caught him around the middle just as his foot slipped. My own leg hit the pool rim hard enough to go numb, and my forearm scraped against the carved stone edge. Water splashed everywhere.

He screamed.

Footsteps sounded behind us.

Lucien was there almost at once.

He saw Matteo soaked through, crying in my arms, and me half-kneeling on the wet stone with blood running down my sleeve.

Matteo tore free and ran to him.

“Papa,” he cried. “She pulled me here. She said she wished I would disappear.”

Lucien looked at me.

I knew that expression. Disgust first. Then disappointment.

“He climbed up by himself,” I said. “I was pulling him back.”

“Enough.”

He lifted Matteo and held him close.

Then he looked down at me as if the scene before him confirmed everything he had ever feared.

“He’s five,” he said. “What exactly do you expect me to believe?”