Chapter 259

The first knock came at 8:17 p.m.

Mrs. Hayes almost ignored it.

She was in the kitchen, rinsing the cup she had used for tea, with the television murmuring in the sitting room. Emilia had called earlier that evening. Their conversation had been brief, filled with the usual reassurances and a promise to speak again tomorrow.

It had been enough to settle Mrs. Haye’s mind.

The knock came again.

Three measured strikes against the front door.

Mrs. Hayes dried her hands on a dish towel and glanced at the clock.

8:17.

She wasn’t expecting anyone.

"Coming," she called.

The words came out automatically. She crossed the sitting room, her slippers whispering against the tiled floor, and stopped in front of the door.

Something made her hesitate.

Perhaps it was the hour. Perhaps it was the peculiar stillness on the other side, the absence of the small sounds that usually accompanied an ordinary visitor.

She looked through the peephole, and the world stopped.

For one suspended second, Selena’s mind refused to understand what her eyes were seeing.

The man standing on her doorstep wore a dark coat over a black shirt. His hair was shorter than she remembered, his face leaner, with the familiar lines around his mouth more pronounced.

There was something different about the way he held himself, too. He stood without fidgeting, without impatience, as though the world had learned to wait for him.

She knew that face. She had memorized it once. She had loved it once. She had watched it disappear beneath the weight of a coffin and carried the grief of its supposed owner for years.

Her fingers slipped from the peephole. She stumbled backwards.

"No, no, no."

Her hip struck the narrow table beside the door. A framed photograph rattled against the wall, but she barely heard it.

It wasn’t possible.

She had seen the body.

She remembered the funeral, the people who had filled the church, the suffocating smell of flowers, and the hands that had held hers while she tried to understand how a man could be alive one day and become a memory the next.

She remembered Emilia asking questions. She remembered trying to explain death to a child while barely understanding it herself.

She remembered the years that followed.

The loneliness, and the unanswered questions. The nights when she had wondered whether there was something she could have done differently, something she should have noticed, some warning she had missed.

She had buried him, mourned him, and learned to live without him. And now he was standing outside her house.

Alive.

Mrs. Hayes pressed a hand against her mouth.

The knock came again.

This time, she flinched so violently that her shoulder struck the wall.

"Selena."

Her knees nearly gave way.

He had said her name. He had said it as though he had every right to. As though nothing had happened.

As though he had not spent years being dead.

Selena stared at the door, her heart hammering so violently that she could feel every beat in her throat.

She should call someone.

The police. Anyone.

Her phone was on the kitchen counter.

"Selena," he repeated. "Open the door."

She shook her head.

It was a ridiculous act. He couldn’t see her through the door, and even if he could, he would not care.

She knew that somehow.

The man she remembered would have cared.

The man standing outside her house was a stranger wearing her dead husband’s face.

She backed away from the door, and then the handle moved.

Selena froze.

She had locked it.

A soft metallic click followed, and the door opened. He had a key.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Dante stood in the doorway, one hand resting on the handle, his gaze moving over the sitting room before settling on her.

His eyes were the same.

That was the worst part.

She might have been able to convince herself he was an impostor if everything about him had changed. She might have found some small difference in the shape of his nose or the line of his jaw and clung to it.

But his eyes were the ones she remembered.

The eyes that had once looked at her across a crowded room and made her believe she had finally found somewhere safe to put her heart.

The eyes that had watched Emilia take her first steps. The eyes that had looked at Selena and promised her a future.

Now they regarded her with a cool, detached interest that made her skin crawl.

"Dante?"

His name escaped her as a whisper.

He closed the door behind him.

The click of the latch sounded impossibly loud.

Selena stared at him. She tried to speak again, but her throat had closed.

He looked at her for another moment, then glanced at the framed photographs on the wall. His gaze passed over a picture of Emilia at graduation, another of mother and daughter standing together outside a restaurant, and finally returned to Selena.

"You look well."

She made a strangled sound.

Well?

He had walked into her house after years of being mourned, after leaving her to believe she was a widow, after making her build a life around his absence.

And he was telling her she looked well?

"You’re..." She swallowed. "You’re dead."

Dante’s expression did not change. "That’s what you were told."

Selena stared at him.

The room seemed to tilt.

"What are you talking about?"

"I’m not here to discuss my death."

He said it so casually that her breath caught.

He wasn’t here to discuss his death.

As though it were a minor inconvenience. An administrative error. Something that had happened to someone else.

Selena’s hands began to shake. "How?"

He tilted his head. "How what?"

"How are you here?"

"I walked through the door."

She recoiled as if he had struck her.

The man she had married had possessed a cruel streak, yes. He could be cold when angry, stubborn when challenged, and frighteningly persuasive when he wanted something. But there had once been warmth beneath all of it. A capacity for affection. A smile that had belonged to her.

She could find none of that now.

Whatever stood before her had learned how to wear his face without carrying the rest of him.

"Get out," she whispered.

Dante looked at her. "I need something from you." He said bluntly.

She shook her head.

"You don’t even know what it is."

"I don’t care."

"That makes two of us." He took a step towards her.

Selena immediately retreated. "Don’t come near me."

He stopped, but only because he had apparently decided to.

"Where is the necklace?"

She stared at him. "What?"

"The necklace I gave Emilia."

Her blood turned cold.

The necklace.

A delicate piece of jewellery with a small pendant, the kind of thing a father might give his daughter without expecting it to become anything more than a keepsake.

Emilia had been little when Dante gave it to her.

Selena remembered the way her daughter had held it in both hands, delighted by the tiny gift. She remembered Dante fastening the chain around Emilia’s neck, bending to kiss the top of her head, telling her it was something she should keep safe.

At the time, Selena had thought it was a sweet gesture.

She had no idea what it meant.

She had no idea that years later, after Emilia had grown up believing her father was dead, that little necklace would become the reason he came back.

"Why?" Selena asked.

Her voice sounded thin and unfamiliar.

Dante’s patience visibly diminished. "Where is it?"

"I don’t know."

"Don’t lie to me."

"I’m not lying!"

Her voice rose sharply, startling even her.

For a fraction of a second, she saw something familiar in his face. The flash of temper she had once spent years learning to anticipate.

Then it disappeared.

He looked at her as though she were an inconvenience.

"Emilia had it when she was younger. You kept her belongings. You kept everything."

Selena swallowed.

She did keep things.

She had kept the necklace, too. Not because she knew it was important, but because it had belonged to Emilia.

It had been a gift from a father her daughter had lost.

"Why do you want it?" she asked again.

Dante’s jaw tightened. "That isn’t your concern."

"She’s my daughter."

"Yes."

"Then why are you asking me for something you gave her? Why aren’t you going to her yourself?"

His expression changed.

The coldness sharpened.

Selena’s stomach twisted.

"You don’t need to involve Emilia," she continued, speaking faster now, desperate to understand, desperate to find some piece of the man she had once known. "Whatever this is, whatever has happened to you, you can explain it. You can tell me why you—"

"Stop."

The single word silenced her.

Dante stepped closer.

"I didn’t come here to explain myself. I didn’t come here to apologize. And I certainly didn’t come here to discuss our marriage."

Selena felt the room closing around her. "Our marriage?"

"Whatever you want to call it."

She stared at him in disbelief. "You were my husband."

"And you were my wife." His mouth curved without warmth. "You’re making this unnecessarily sentimental."