What I Chose

POV: Matteo

"Can we talk," my brother said, finding me in the empty garden an hour after the session, the chaos of the chamber still ringing in my ears. "Just the two of us. Please."

"I don't know what there is to say," I said, though I sat down on the stone bench anyway, making room for him beside me.

He sat, quiet for a moment, the morning light catching the lines on his face that hadn't been there two years ago, evidence of whatever hiding he'd endured all this time.

"I keep thinking about what I said in there," he said finally. "You never had to do this. I meant it. But I've been sitting with it since, and I don't think it was fair of me to say it like that. Like it was simple."

"It wasn't simple," I said, my voice quiet.

"No," he agreed. "I don't think it was."

I looked out at the garden, the same one I'd decorated years ago for a life I thought I'd never get, and felt something in my chest finally loosen, some old, exhausted pressure I'd been carrying since I was a child.

"I need to tell you something," I said. "Something I never let myself say out loud until recently. Not even to Sofia, not fully, not the whole truth of it."

"Alright."

"When you died," I said, "or when I thought you'd died, some part of me didn't only grieve you. Some part of me felt a door open. For the first time in my whole life, a room was going to need me for something that actually mattered, instead of something practical."

He didn't flinch. He just listened, the way he'd always listened when we were children, patient in a way our parents never managed to be with either of us.

"I told everyone it was sacrifice," I continued. "I let mother call me selfless. I let the elders praise me for stepping up. And underneath all of it, some ugly, selfish part of me wanted this. Wanted to matter, finally, the way you'd always mattered without ever having to ask for it."

"Matteo—"

"Let me finish," I said, my voice shaking now, two years of careful hedging finally giving way to the full, unguarded truth. "I took your place at that altar because grief gave me permission to want something I would have been ashamed to want any other way. I've spent two years telling myself it was noble. It wasn't. It was the first genuinely selfish thing I ever let myself do, and I've been paying for it, and making everyone around me pay for it too, ever since."

The silence that followed felt different from every silence I'd braced myself for. Not judgment. Not disgust. Just quiet, steady attention, my brother watching me with something that looked almost like recognition.

"I'm not angry at you," he said finally.

"You should be."

"Maybe," he said. "But I'm not. Because I understand it, Matteo. Better than you'd think."

"What do you mean."

He was quiet again, his hands folded in his lap, something working behind his expression that looked like its own kind of confession working its way loose.

"I didn't stay hidden all this time because I had no choice," he said slowly. "Not entirely. Dave protected me, yes. But somewhere along the way, staying hidden became easier than coming back and facing what I'd have to reckon with if I did. The marriage I'd been groomed for my whole life, an alliance I never once wanted, a role I was terrified of failing at the moment it actually started."

"You wanted to disappear," I said, understanding arriving slow and sad.

"I wanted someone else to carry it," he admitted, his voice rough now. "I let myself believe staying hidden was about safety, the same way you let yourself believe stepping into my place was about sacrifice. We were both telling ourselves stories that let us have what we actually wanted without having to admit we wanted it."

I sat with that, the strange, aching symmetry of it settling over me, two brothers who'd spent two years apart, each quietly choosing something selfish and calling it something else entirely.

"What about Dave," I said carefully. "What was any of this to him."

Something shifted across my brother's face at the question, grief and something darker moving underneath it.

"Dave loved me," he said, quiet. "Genuinely, I think, at the start. He hid me because he believed it was protecting me, and maybe, in the very beginning, it was."

"And now?"

"Now," he said, and his voice caught, rough and unsteady in a way that made my chest tighten with sudden, sharp concern, "I don't recognize what it's become. Two years of devotion that curdled into something I don't have a name for anymore. Something that stopped being about keeping me safe, and became about keeping me his."

The word hung heavy between us, my brother's voice trembling around it, and I understood, watching him struggle to finish the thought, that whatever came next in this conversation was going to require something neither of us was ready for.