When Love Turns to Ash Novel – Chapter 18
Jax arrived in Florence a broken man.
His company was gone, his family name disgraced, his future a bleak, empty landscape.
He’d sold the last of his possessions, a vintage guitar, to buy a one-way ticket.
He found out about my exhibition, the “Frammenti di Cuore,” through an obscure art blog.
He tried to get into the vernissage, the opening night, but he was disheveled, without an invitation. The security guard turned him away. He stood across the street, a pathetic figure in the rain, watching the elegantly dressed crowd spill out of the gallery.
He had no right to be there. No right to claim any connection to me.
Then he saw me.
Emerging from the gallery, laughing, my arm linked with Mateo’s. I looked… radiant. Happy. Genuinely happy.
Mateo leaned down, whispering something in my ear that made me throw my head back and laugh again.
He gently touched the side of my neck, his fingers brushing against the spot where my collarbone scar lay hidden.
The kintsugi tattoo I’d gotten, a delicate tracery of golden lines over the puckered skin, was a secret between me and Mateo. He’d designed it.
Jax saw the gesture, the easy intimacy.
Pain, sharp and visceral, twisted in his gut.
It was a pain born of regret, of irreversible loss.
Ben appeared at my side, clapping Mateo on the shoulder, then hugging me fiercely.
Jax watched them, the three of them, a picture of warmth and belonging.
A family.
He was the outsider, the ghost at the feast.
“Jax? What in God’s name are you doing here?”
Ben had spotted him. His voice was low, furious. He crossed the street, shielding me from Jax’s view.
“I… I had to see her, Ben,” Jax stammered. “I need to apologize.”
Ben’s laugh was harsh, devoid of humor.
“Apologize? You think an apology can fix what you did? The years of lies? The humiliation? The physical scars you left on her, Jax?”
He gestured towards me, where Mateo was now protectively standing by my side.
“You see that tattoo on her collarbone? It covers the scar you gave her. The night your precious sculpture fell. The night you saved Chloe and left my sister to bleed.”
Jax flinched as if struck. He hadn’t known. Or hadn’t let himself know the extent of the damage.
His guilt intensified, a crushing weight.
He remembered the blood in the fountain.
“I’ll wait,” Jax choked out, his voice hoarse. “I’ll wait for her forgiveness. However long it takes.”
Ben shook his head, his eyes filled with a mixture of pity and contempt.
“Stay away from her, Jax. She’s happy. Mateo is a good man. He’s kind, he’s respectful. He loves her for who she is, not for what she can do for him.”
He looked back at me, at Mateo, at the life I was building.
“She’s moved on. You need to do the same.”
Jax watched as Ben rejoined me and Mateo.
They looked back at him, once, then turned and walked away, disappearing into the Florentine night.
He finally accepted it.
Savannah Miller was gone from his life.
Forever.
And he had no one to blame but himself.