My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 615

Chapter 615

I shook my head, “You all keep describing me like I’m some machine that never breaks. You’re not wrong. I don’t make many mistakes. I don’t miss much. My life has always been built around preventing failure.”

Then I looked back at Vincenzo.

“And it’s exhausting. You keep calling her imperfect. You keep listing everything she struggles with as though those things somehow make her less compatible with me,” I smiled again, “You’ve got it backwards.”

Vincenzo sighed, crossing his arms over his chest, “Explain…”

I looked down for a brief second before meeting his eyes again.

“You think she’ll never live up to my standards. She doesn’t even know what my standards are. She has never once tried to become someone else just to make me comfortable and I don’t want her to.”

My jaw tightened.

“You all spent my entire life looking at me and seeing the same thing. The reliable brother, the rational one, the robot… Nobody ever asked why.”

I looked around the room and suddenly everyone was frowning, just like Gianna did when she slowly got to know

“You all thought I was built differently. You admired it. You relied on it. But none of you stopped long enough to ask whether there was a reason I couldn’t feel what everyone else did.”

My eyes returned to Vincenzo.

“She did. For the first time in my life… someone looked at me and didn’t see perfection. She saw something missing. She looked at me like there was something deeply wrong with me and she was right. I have Alexithymia.”

The equation had always made sense to me. It surprised me that nobody else had seen it.

“She is every piece of me that never developed and I’m every piece of her that keeps her safe. She is my mess. My recklessness. My impulse. My disorder. My chaos.”

I held Vincenzo’s gaze without blinking.

“My life before Gianna… worked. My life after Gianna… finally meant something.”

For the first time in years, I didn’t struggle to find the right words.

“She’s the missing parts of me and I’m hoping… I’m the missing parts of her.”