Cole hasn't moved. His eyes have gone flat and cold, all the warmth stripped away, replaced by something that was already planning.
"Said I 'made him do it.' That if I'd just listened—" The medal bites into my grip. "I ended up in the hospital with a premature labor scare. The baby was in distress. I didn't know for six hours if she was going to live because he decided to teach me a lesson."
"Angelina." My name sounds like a prayer and a curse in his mouth.
"I called Sal from my hospital bed, still hooked up to monitors, still not knowing if my baby would survive." The memory tastes like copper and fear and the antiseptic smell of the labor ward. The scratchy hospital gown. The beeping machines. Sal's voice on the phone, going quiet and then very, very cold. "I told him 'I need out. He's going to kill us both.' Sal made him an offer. Money and an overseas position. Or... consequences."
I take a deep breath. "Adrian took the money. Left for Milan before Chesca was ever born." My composure finally shatters.
"That should have been the end of it." I straighten the throw pillow again. Realize I'm doing it. Force my hands into my lap. "You don't just walk out of something like that clean."
"I take Wellbutrin. Three hundred milligrams a day, split into two doses, one with my coffee, one with dinner." I say it the way I'd read lab results into evidence. Clinical and detached. Easier that way.
"It lives in the medicine cabinet behind the children's Tylenol so Chesca doesn't ask questions. Because God forbid the Honorable Judge Castellano can't keep her own brain chemistry in line without pharmaceutical intervention."
His expression doesn't change. I keep going. If I stop, I won't start again.
"I have panic attacks. Not the kind in movies. The kind where I pull over on the way to court because my hands won't stop shaking. Where I lose the thread of an oral argument because all I can hear is my own heartbeat." I cross my arms over my chest. "I haven't slept through the night in eight years. I check the locks multiple times. I count every body in every room I enter."
"Dr. Peters calls it PTSD with comorbid generalized anxiety disorder." I almost smile. "I call it Tuesday."
The joke lands on nothing.
"I tried telling someone once. Two years after the divorce, a nice man, a pediatrician." I pick at the thread on the pillow I just straightened. "Made it about halfway through and he looked at me like I was a case file. Paid for dinner. Never called again."
I face Cole and brace for it. The recalibration. The careful distance. The look the pediatrician gave me right before he asked for the check.
"He's been gone all those years. And he shows up at hersoccer gamelike he has the RIGHT—"
I lose the ability to finish the sentence.
The tears come then, eight years of them, twelve really, since the moment Cole walked away and I had to learn how to survive without him.
"He almost killed her before she was born." The words come out strangled. "And now he wants custody. He can't— I can't—"
Cole crosses the room in three strides.
He doesn't ask permission, just pulls me against his chest, and for one terrible second my body goes rigid, bracing for the wrong kind of hands.
Then his scent registers. Saffron and cedar. Not Adrian's cologne.
Cole. This is Cole.
His arms wrap around me, and I let them.
"He's not taking her." His voice is low and absolute. "He's not touching either of you again."
"You can't promise that—"
"I already did."
His heartbeat is even against my cheek. Even, even, even.
Breathe, tesoro. Match his rhythm. You're here.
I shouldn't need this, shouldn't need him specifically. I've handled everything alone for eight years. Built a life. Raised a daughter. Became a federal judge.
But his arms feel like the first safe place I've had since I was twenty-two years old.