Page 67 of From Italy With Love

She crossed to me slowly, hesitantly, and reached for Henry. I handed him over, my arms suddenly empty and cold, watching as she held him close against her chest, breathing him in deeply, memorizing every detail. The weight of him. The warmth. The sweet baby smell of his skin.

“I love you,” she whispered to him, her voice breaking into jagged pieces. “I love you so much, my sweet boy. My beautiful, perfect boy. Mommy will be back soon. I promise. I promise you.”

Another lie.

But I didn’t call her on it. Couldn’t. Instead, I just stood there frozen, watching as she kissed his forehead, his soft cheeks, his tiny perfect hands, like she was trying to physically imprint him on her soul, trying to carry the memory of him with her wherever she was going.

Then she looked at me, her eyes red-rimmed and devastated.

“Salvatore.”

“Don’t.” I couldn’t hear it. Couldn’t bear to hear her try to make this okay, try to spin some story that would convince me that everything would somehow be fine, that this wasn’t what it clearly was. “Just go.”

“I love you,” she said, tears streaming down her face in steady rivulets, her mascara leaving dark tracks on her pale skin. “I love you so much. Please believe that. Please know that this is killing me. That leaving you and Henry is destroying me from the inside out.”

“Then stay.” My words came out broken, desperate, stripped of all pride. “Please, Madigan. Please stay. We’ll figure something else out. We’ll send money for his medical bills, we’ll hire the best doctors in the country, we’ll do whatever it takes; I don’t care what it costs. But please don’t go back there. Please don’t leave us.”

She was sobbing now, her whole body shaking with the force of it, trembling like she might collapse. “I can’t. I’m sorry, I can’t. I have to see him. I have to be there. He needs me.”

Outside, through the window, I heard the unmistakable sound of a car pulling up the long gravel drive, tires crunching, engine idling.

Her ride was here.

Time had run out.

She handed Henry back to me carefully, reverently, and the moment our hands touched, our fingers brushing as she transferred his weight, I grabbed her wrist. Held on tight. “If you walk out that door,” I said, my voice low and rough, barely recognizable as my own, “you’re not coming back. You know that, don’t you? You know this is goodbye. This is the last time we’ll stand in this room together like this.”

“It’s not goodbye,” she insisted, but her eyes—those beautiful winter eyes I’d fallen in love with—told a different story. They told the truth her mouth couldn’t. “It’s just a few days. Maybe a week. I’ll be back before you know it. You won’t even have time to miss me.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.” I pulled her closer, desperate, drowning, clinging to the wreckage of us. “You’re lying to both of us because the truth is too terrible to face. Too big and too final. But I’m facing it. I’m looking right at it. This is the end, Madigan. This is how we end. Not with some big dramatic fight, but with you walking away because someone else needs you more than we do.”

“No.” She shook her head violently. “No, I won’t let it be. I’ll come back. I swear to you, I’ll come back.”

The car honked outside.

She pulled away from me, grabbed her bag, and walked to the door. Then she stopped, her hand on the knob, her back to me.

“I love you,” she said one more time. “I’ll always love you. No matter what happens. Please remember that.”

Then she opened the door and walked out.

I stood there, holding our son, watching through the window as she got into the car. The engine started with a low rumble that seemed to echo in my chest. I watched as it pulled away slowly, deliberately, kicking up dust on the long gravel drive that stretched out before our house. I kept watching, unable to look away, as it disappeared around the bend in the road, taking her away from me.

Taking everything away from me.

Henry started to cry, his small body shuddering against my chest, as if he could sense that something fundamental had just shifted, that the delicate balance of the world he’d known for his entire short life had just been torn apart. Maybe babies could feel these things. Maybe they understood more than we gave them credit for. Or maybe he just wanted his mother, and on some level, he already knew she wasn’t coming back.

I held him close, rocking him gently back and forth in that instinctive rhythm that all parents seemed to know, my own tears falling silently into his soft hair. His tiny fists clutched at my shirt, desperate for comfort I didn’t know how to give.

“It’s okay,” I whispered, my voice cracking, even though it wasn’t. Even though nothing would ever be okay again. “It’s okay, buddy. Daddy’s here. Daddy’s got you.” My words felt hollow as they left my lips, empty promises to a child who deserved so much better.

But even as I said it, I knew it was a lie.

Because I didn’t have him. Not really. Not the way he needed. Not the way Madigan had. Because his mother was gone, and she wasn’t coming back, and I was going to have to figure out how to raise him alone. How to be both parents when I’d barely figured out how to be one.