I look down, unable to hold his gaze. Because I know what that emotion is. It’s hurt.

It takes all I have to look back up at him. “I just wanted you to come for me. With the aspirin, I mean. I didn’t think it through. I didn’t…when Colette told me you have my father—”

“Ah. Colette.”

“I just…I felt betrayed. After everything that happened, the progress we’d made, you were keeping that from me. And you never came back, Santiago. For days after you got that call, you didn’t even call or talk to me. I got angrier the longer I waited, and I was going to confront you, but then I saw the sheet, the stupid bloody sheet, and I remembered what you said you’d do with it on our wedding night. That you’d show it to my father. I was burning it. Not the pictures of your father or brother. I went out to the chapel so no one would find me to stop me. And then you got so angry. What you did…” I feel my face heat, and I can’t hold his gaze. “And then locking me in my room.” I look up at him. “You can’t do that anymore. I can’t stand that. Punish me any other way but not that again. If—”

“I won’t.” He cuts me off.

“I’m just…if I’m going to stay, I won’t be put back in that room.”

“If?”

“I mean it. I can’t do that again, Santiago. Send me away if you can’t stand to see me, and when the baby comes, we can work something out—”

“Are you completely daft?”

“What?”

“Or just hard of hearing?” He takes my hands in his. “I came for you. For you.”

I swallow hard.

“You are my wife, Ivy.”

“In name.”

“No. Not in name. Not anymore. Not for either of us. And you know it.” There is a long moment of silence between us before he continues. “What exactly did Colette tell you?”

Shoot. “I don’t want to get her into trouble.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Nothing. She just thought I knew that you’d taken over my father’s care. Have you?”

“How did she know that?”

“This isn’t about Colette, Santiago. Did you take over my father’s care?”

He nods.

“How long ago?”

“Since my poisoning. Your father was poisoned too, Ivy. That’s what caused him to go into cardiac arrest and eventually a coma. Someone tried to kill him, and I can guess who.”

I feel the blood drain from my face. “You think it’s Abel? You think he tried to kill our father?”

He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

"Doesn’t it?”

I shift my gaze momentarily away, then back to him. “How is he? My dad?”