“Because you were my wife. Because I still love you. Because I fucked up. And because I wanted to make it up to you.”

“You thought…” I whispered but stopped, momentarily unable to go on then I went on. “You thought that you could make it up to me by infiltrating my life and saddling me with your ill-gotten gains. And when I didn’t hang around long enough to say yes to this super-generous offer, you forged my name on the documents anyway so you could be certain to continue infiltrating my life at the same time fucking it up when the best thing you could do, bar building a time machine so that you could go back and make sure you never met me, would be to leave me… the fuck… alone?”

He pressed his lips together and said not a word.

I turned to his father.

It killed me to see this was killing him.

But I could not help that. I couldn’t. I had enough on my plate.

So I wasn’t even going to try.

“I love you,” I said softly. “I always will. I think of you often, so often…” I sucked in a breath and decided to leave that because I couldn’t go there. “Your son took a lot from me. All of it hurt, so much you wouldn’t believe me even if I described the pain. And losing you was part of that pain.”

Tears filled his eyes. I watched them as I felt the same happen in mine.

“Honey,” he whispered, taking his hand from the wall and turning away from his son to face me.

“I love you and miss you but I’m not coming back, never, no matter what happens to Damian. I can’t have anything that reminds me of him in my life. It’s toxic. I just released it and I can’t take it back. I can’t have it poisoning me anymore. Not anymore. He took eighteen years of my life. He can’t have any more.”

I watched him swallow.

“This man holding me is the man of my dreams, Don,” I told him quietly. “Tonight, someone shot at him. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to follow that trail to Damian. He has family. He has children. And he has me. Talk to your son. Make him stay out of my life and leave me and everyone I love alone. Please. Please do that for me.”

He sniffed, his eyes still wet and getting wetter and then he nodded.