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His breath left him slowly, relief failing to erase the anguish in his eyes. “All right.”

“The lies killed him.” My voice broke, but once the words escaped, I couldn’t stop them. “Every secret. Every warning. Every person deciding I was safer without the truth. Mom lied about you. Nolan knew and used it against her. I lied about Salvatore. I lied about Henry. I let everyone believe I left college because I was irresponsible, when in fact I had a husband and a baby waiting for me.”

Cian settled on the floor beside me and turned his body toward mine, close enough to stay but careful to keep his hands to himself while I came apart.

“If Mom had told you, maybe I would have known I could come to you. Maybe I wouldn’t have believed Nolan when he said everyone would turn against Salvatore. Maybe you would have helped us. Maybe Uncle Sal would have listened to you.” My breath hitched. “Maybe Salvatore would still be alive.”

“Maybe,” Cian said quietly.

I stared at him, furious in some small, wounded part of me that he had not denied it.

“I won’t tell you none of that could have happened,” he said. “I won’t take another choice away from you by deciding which version of the past you’re allowed to grieve. Maybe if you had known, you would have come to me. Maybe I could have helped. You should have had the chance to find out.”

A sob tore through me. I pressed both hands to my mouth, but the grief had been locked away too long to stay contained.

“You said you would have killed him.”

Pain moved across Cian’s face. He lowered his gaze. “I did.”

“You said he was too old for me. That he never should have touched me.”

“I was wrong,” he answered without hesitation.

“You didn’t even know him.”

“No,” he said. His eyes dropped to Salvatore’s ring against my sweater. “I didn’t. I was thinking like a man who had just learned he had a daughter and wanted to reach backward through every year he had missed. I saw Salvatore’s age and his name before I saw what losing him had done to you.”

“He loved me.”

“I know.”

“He never made me feel young. He never treated me like I was foolish, fragile, or incapable of choosing my own life. He was the first person who asked what I wanted and believed my answer mattered.”

“Then he was more of a man than the rest of us.”

The admission left me silent.

Cian shifted closer, still leaving enough space for me to refuse him. “I’m sorry I made his love sound like something that happened to you instead of something you chose. He was your husband. You chose him, and he chose you. I don’t get to lessen that because I wish I had been there to ask different questions before you married him.”

My fingers closed around the ring. “I miss him so much.”

“I know, baby.”

“No, you don’t.” The cruelty of it landed between us, but he accepted the blow without flinching. “I wake up reaching for him. I turn when someone laughs the way he did. Sometimes I forget for half a second, and then I lose him all over again. I have been losing him every morning for four years.”

Cian’s eyes filled with tears.

“I don’t get to visit his grave,” I said. “I don’t get to tell stories about my husband or wear my grief where anyone can see it. I don’t get anniversaries, sympathy, or even the dignity of being known as his widow. I had to mourn him like loving him was something shameful, when loving him was the only beautiful choice I ever made for myself.”

Salvatore found me on the kitchen floor after a nightmare had dragged Nolan’s voice across the years and into a house where he had never set foot. I sat with my back against the cabinets, knees pulled to my chest, afraid of a danger that was no longer in the room but still lived inside me.

Salvatore didn’t demand an explanation. He simply lowered himself beside me, shoulder resting against mine, and waited until my breathing loosened enough that every inhale no longer felt like a fight.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he whispered.

“What if I never can?”

“Then you never do.” He took my hand and pressed it over his heart. “You don’t owe me your pain because I love you. But you have to let me sit beside you while it hurts.”