After all this. After everything.
He would remember.
He would come around.
He had to.
Because I wasn’t giving up.
Not on him.
Not ever.
Chapter 11
DMITRI VOLKOV
The garden behind the villa had become my prison.
Once, it had been a sanctuary—a place where the sun bounced off gravel paths, rose trellises sagged with blooms, and the fountain sang in soft, meditative tones in the afternoons.
I had walked here countless times with Penelope, watching her fingers trail along jasmine vines.
Now, it was a ruin.
Weeds tore through flower beds, a blanket of green algae coated the fountain’s stagnant basin, and the stone benches were cracked and brittle, littered with dead leaves.
The air smelled of damp earth and decay, sharp and biting.
No birds came here anymore.
Only silence—thick, oppressive silence—and the occasional rustle of the wind through overgrown cypress trees that loomed like sentinels around the perimeter.
I sat on the same wrought-iron bench every day, elbows on my knees, staring at nothing.
Pretending I hadn’t remembered everything. Pretending I hadn’t failed in every possible way.
Each day was another exercise in endurance. Another day pretending that I could live in this villa without her, without the family I had destroyed.
The memories had returned in shards at first—fragmented, jagged, cutting deep into the core of me.
I could no longer ignore them:
Penelope at fifteen, under that Brooklyn oak, laughing as I stole kisses she barely knew she wanted.
Penelope at twenty-five, eyes wide with terror, when I dragged her across the border to Lake Como.
Penelope in a hospital bed, blood blooming across her chest as she took the bullet meant for me.
Penelope in Greece, raising our son alone while I mourned a ghost.
Every insult I had thrown at her.
Every door I had locked. Every choice I had forced upon her—all of it haunted me in relentless replay.
I’d hired the best specialists money could buy—neurologists from Zurich, psychologists from Boston, hypnotherapists from Tel Aviv.
Every session had been designed to strip away the lies I’d told myself, to reconstruct the man who had become something monstrous.