A shudder rattled her at the memory. “He said I made him lose his mind, drove him to it…”

He looked beyond horrified. “No. Dios, Cybele…it had nothing to do with you, do you hear? Mel never took responsibility for any problem he created for himself. He always found someone else to accuse, usually me or his parents. Dios-that he turned on you, too, accused you of this!” His face turned a burnt bronze, his lips worked, thinning with the effort to contain his aggression. She had the feeling that if Mel were alive and here, Rodrigo would have dragged him out of his wheelchair and taken him apart.

At last he rasped, “It had to do with his own gambler’s behavior. He always took insane risks, in driving, in sports, in surgeries. One of those insane risks was the gambling that landed him in so much debt. I gave him the money to gamble, too. He told me it was to buy you the things you wanted. But I investigated. He never bought you anything.”

So this was it. The explanation he’d withheld.

“As for the stunt that cost him his life and could have cost yours, it wasn’t his first plane crash but his third. He walked away from so many disasters he caused without a scratch that even the one that cut him in half didn’t convince him that his luck had run out and the next time would probably be fatal. As it was.”

For a long moment, all she heard was her choppy breath, the blood swooshing in her ears, his harsh breathing.

Then he added, “Or maybe he wanted to die.”

“Why would he?” she rasped. “He believed you’d put him back on his feet. He said you were very optimistic.”

He looked as if he’d explode. “Then he lied to you. Again. There was nothing I could do for him. I made it absolutely clear.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “So he was really desperate.”

“I think he was worse than that.” His hiss felt as if it would scrape her flesh from her bone. “I think he’d gone over the edge, wanted to take you with him. So I would never have you.”

She lurched as if under a flesh-gouging lash.

Rodrigo went on, bitterness pouring out of him. “Mel always had a sickness. Me. Since the first day I set foot in the Braddocks’ house, he idolized me and seethed with jealousy of me, alternated between emulating me to the point of impersonation, to doing everything to be my opposite, between loving and hating me.”

It all made so much sense it was horrifying. How she’d found Mel so different at first, how he’d switched to the seamless act of emulating Rodrigo. So it had been Rodrigo she’d fallen in love with all along. It was unbelievable. Yet it was the truth.

And it dictated her next action. The only thing she could do.

She pushed out of his arms, rose to unsteady feet, looked down at him, the man she loved beyond life itself.

And she cut her heart out. “I want a divorce.”


Cybele’s demand fell on Rodrigo like a scythe.

Rage, at himself, hacked him much more viciously.

He’d been so stupid. He’d railed at a dead man, not just the man he’d considered his younger brother, but the man Cybele still loved, evidently more than she could ever love him.

He shot to his feet, desperation the one thing powering him. “Cybele, no. Lo siento, mi amor. I didn’t mean…”

She shut her eyes in rejection, stopping his apology and explanation. “You meant every word. And you had every right. Because you are right. You at last explained my disappointment in Mel, my resentment toward him. You rid me of any guilt I ever felt toward him.”

Rodrigo reeled. “You-you didn’t love Mel?”

She shook her head. Then in a dead monotone, she told him her side of the story.

“Seems I always sensed his manipulations, even if I would have never guessed their reason or extent. My subconscious must have considered it a violation, so it wiped out the traumatic time until I was strong enough. I still woke up with overpowering gut feelings. But without context, they weren’t enough to stop me from tormenting myself when I felt nothing but relief at his death and anger toward him, when I wanted you from the moment I woke up. Now I know. I always wanted you.”

Elation and confusion tore him in two. “You did? Dios-then why are you asking for a divorce?”

“Because I don’t matter. Only my baby does. I would never have married you if I’d realized you would be the worst father for him. Instead of loving his father, you hate Mel with a lifelong passion. And though you have every right to feel that way, I can never subject my child to the life I had. Worse than the life I had. My stepfather didn’t know my father, and he also didn’t consider me the bane of his life. He just cared nothing for me. But it was my mother’s love for him, her love for the children she had with him, that alienated her from me. And she doesn’t love him a fraction of how much I love you.”

He should have realized all that. He knew her scars in detail, knew she was barely coping now, as an adult, with her alienated childhood and current bland family situation. But he got it now. The sheer magnitude of his blunder. It could cost him his life. Her.

“I never hated Mel,” he pleaded. “It was Mel who considered me the usurper of his parents’ respect and affection. I loved him, like brothers love their imperfect siblings. Mel did have a lot to him that I appreciated, and I always hoped he’d believe that, be happy playing on his own strengths and stop competing with me in mine. But I could never convince him, and it ate at him until he lashed out, injured you while trying to get to me, the source of his discontent. It was foolish, tragic, and I do hate his taking you away from me, but I don’t hate him. You have to believe that.”

She clearly didn’t. And she had every reason to distrust his words after that moronic display of bitterness and anger.

She confirmed his worst fears, her voice as inanimate as her face. “I can’t take the chance with my baby’s life.”

Agony bled out of him. “Do you think so little of me, Cybele? You claim to love me, and you still think I’d be so petty, so cruel, as to take whatever I felt for Mel out on an innocent child?”

She stumbled two steps back to escape his pleading hands. “You might not be able to help it. He did injure you, repeatedly, throughout his life. That he’s now dead doesn’t mean that you can forget. Or forgive. I wouldn’t blame you if you could do neither.”

“But that baby is yours, Cybele. He could be yours from the very devil and I’d still love and cherish him because he’s yours. Because I love you. I would die for you.”

The stone that seemed to be encasing her cracked, and she came apart, a mass of tremors and tears. “And I would d-die for you. I feel I will die without you. And that only makes me more scared, of what I’d do to please you, to keep your love, if I weaken now, and it turns out, with your best intentions, you’d never be able to love my baby as he deserves to be loved. And I-I can’t risk that. Please, I beg you, don’t make it impossible to leave you. Please…let me go.”

He lunged for her, as if to grab her before she vanished. “I can’t, Cybele.”

She wrenched away, tears splashing over his hands. His arms fell to his sides, empty, pain impaling his heart, despair wrecking his sanity.

Suddenly, realization hit him like a vicious uppercut.

He couldn’t believe it. Dios, he was far worse than a moron.

He did have the solution to everything.

He blocked her path. “Querida, forgive me, I’m such an idiot. I conditioned myself so hard to never let the truth slip, that even after you told me your real feelings for Mel, it took seeing you almost walking out on me to make me realize I don’t have to hide it anymore. It is true I would have loved any baby of yours as mine, no matter what. But I love this baby, I want him and I would die for him, too. Because he is mine. Literally.”

Fourteen

“I am the baby’s father.”

Cybele stared at Rodrigo, comprehension suspended.

“If you don’t believe me, a DNA test will prove it.”

And it ripped through her like a knife in her gut.

One thing was left in her mind, in the world. A question.

She croaked it. “How?”

He looked as if he’d rather she asked him to step in front of a raging bull. Then he exhaled. “A few years back, Mel had a paternity suit. During the tests to prove that he didn’t father the child, he found out that he was infertile. Then he told me that you were demanding proof of his commitment to your marriage, the emotional security of a baby. He said he couldn’t bear to reveal another shortcoming to you, that he couldn’t lose you, that you were what kept him alive. He asked me to donate the sperm. Just imagining you blossoming with my baby, nurturing it, while I could never claim it or you, almost killed me.

“But I believed him when he said he’d die if you left him. And even suspecting how he’d stolen you from me, I would have done anything to save him. And I knew if I said no, he would have gotten any sperm donor sample and passed it as his. I couldn’t have you bear some stranger’s baby. So I agreed.

“But believing you were suffering from psychogenic amnesia so that your mind wouldn’t buckle under the trauma of losing him, I couldn’t let you know you’d lost what you thought remained of him. I wouldn’t cause you further psychological damage. I would have settled for being my baby’s father by adoption when he was mine for real.”

So that was why. His change toward her after the accident, treating her like she was the most precious thing in the world, binding himself to her forever. This explained everything much more convincingly than his claim that he’d loved her all along.