“I don’t know,” Leo said honestly. “When I woke up, she was gone. And she took all her stuff. Even the cat.”

“What did you do?”

Thanks, Dad. “Why don’t you ever take my side, huh?”

His father waggled a finger in front of Leo’s face. “Because you’ve got that guilty look. And Tessa is a sweetheart. So if you made her mad enough to leave, you probably did something wrong. Plus, you already said you screwed up.”

Leo sighed. “She found a proposal for the sale of the bakery that Joanna gave me a long time ago. I hid it from Tessa because Joanna asked me to. And I hid it from you because…because I knew buying the bakery was the wrong thing to do. Joanna wants Tessa to have enough money to go to pastry school.”

“That’s very noble of her,” his dad said.

Leo lifted a brow in question. “You don’t sound surprised.”

His dad shrugged. “Joanna already told me she felt she had no choice. That time has passed. How much does pastry school cost?”

His dad knew? So Leo had hidden the truth for…nothing? “Twenty-five thousand dollars for five months of school in Chicago. Not including rent.”

Leo’s dad let out a low whistle. “Did you apologize for keeping a secret?”

“I did it to protect her. But she said she didn’t need my protection.”

“Did you tell her that you love her and you’re sorry? Because that’s what you do when you screw up. You know that, right?” He looked like he was thinking about that for a while. “Also, husbands and wives don’t keep secrets from each other.”

Ugh. The truth was everything; Leo knew that. Especially to someone who’d had it hidden from her in a relationship before.

Also, he couldn’t bring himself to tell his father the rest.

He’d told Tessa he didn’t want attachments. He’d told her that she was replaceable.

That made him wince. Seems that he had a very bad habit of saying hurtful things when he was angry.

“I think I’m coming down with something.” Fool’s disease, for sure.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m hot and cold. And shaky. And my chest hurts.”

His dad muttered something under his breath that he recognized as an Italian saying: Che cavolo. Which literally meant What cabbage!

Yeah. That about said it all.

His dad played with a napkin on the table. “You took your mother too literally, Leo.”

“What are you talking about?”