There’s only one place I haven’t checked. Once upon a time, I would have never walked through those doors without an invitation. Not only because Mateo would never be okay with it, but because the bed he fucked her in during those awful days is the last place I want to see Mia.
Right now I don’t care, though. Right now I’m inoculated. I woke up with Carly, remembering clearly how happy she makes me. I can handle finding Mia in their bedroom, if she’s even in there.
I rap lightly on the door, but no one answers. I turn the knob and push the door open anyway, just to make sure. I probably shouldn’t have. For all I told myself I could deal, if I’d opened that door and seen him fucking her, I would’ve had to pour straight bleach in my eyes.
But he’s not inside. She is. Mia’s asleep on the bed with Dom on her chest. Her shirt’s not entirely covering her breast so I try not to look there, but Dom’s sleeping with his tiny mouth hanging open like a baby bird, waiting for food. Damn, he’s cute.
I should definitely leave them here, but now I don’t know if I’ll get to play with him at all and I want to see him up close without Mateo breathing down my neck. I approach the bed, setting the bag down at the foot. Mateo has a giant-ass bed. I guess it’s a king, but it looks bigger. Mia looks so small curled up on it with our son.
Our son.
I start to sit down, then decide to explore first. When Isabella was first born, Beth and Mateo kept her in an adjoining bedroom. After Beth died, he turned into an oversized storage closet, but I have a feeling Mia wouldn’t want Dom to be far away, so I wander out to see if that’s Dom’s bedroom.
Seems like it is.
The bedroom has been remodeled since Isabella, obviously. Now it’s blue and gray, with elephant paintings on the wall and a soft, blue elephant play mat thing in the floor that Dom must play on. There are pictures hanging up on the wall—three black and white shots, newborn photos. Christmas newborn photos. The middle one is Mia, Mateo and Dom in front of the big-ass Christmas tree he puts up in December. Flanking it are black and white newborn photos of Dom by himself. On the next wall, three more pictures. One for each month. He’s wearing a little sticker that looks like a tie, and it reads 1 month, 2 months, 3 months in each picture.
I’ll never have any of these. There will never be a picture of Dom on my wall. Mateo gets to stand there with Mia in a picture, acting like his father. He’ll always have Dom’s pictures on his walls, him napping in his bed while he works, his mother in his bed every night.
I try to shake off those thoughts as I drift over to the bookshelves on the wall. Carly wanted to buy Dom a copy of Goodnight Moon since she used to read it to Laurel, so we did. I’m relieved to see it’s not one of the books he already has on the shelves.
On the corner of the bookshelf, aimed directly at the crib, is a security camera. Or is it just a standard baby monitor? I guess it could go either way. Someone is probably watching me right now, alerting the fucking watchdogs to come retrieve me.
I should probably go.
I don’t, but I should.
I do leave Dom’s nursery, but only to wander back to Mia’s bedside. She’s still fucking cute when she sleeps. It’s honestly annoying. She’s close to the middle of the bed, probably so she didn’t have to worry about Dom falling off. There’s plenty of room for me to sit on the edge. Her body shifts slightly as I take a seat. Flashes of Vegas come back to me, me asking her to fix my broken heart; Mia helpless, eyes shining, telling me she couldn’t, she didn’t know how.
Carly knew how.
Maybe it’s Dom. Maybe he’s why my thoughts keep drifting back to Mia. This is the exact opposite of how I was raised. I know in most modern households divorce and blended families are commonplace, but not mine. I’ve never known a Morelli man who had to watch his son be raised by someone else. It just doesn’t happen. Our women belong to us ‘til death—theirs, generally, but death nonetheless. Mia broke that rule and traded up. I know that wasn’t her intention, she just slipped and fell into it, but this is weird as hell to me. Just seeing her again triggered things in me, but seeing her and finding out she had my baby?
I don’t even understand how that happened.