2. Dante
CHAPTER 2
Dante
C azzo!
Of all the conversations for Elysa to overhear, it’s the one that would devastate her. I felt like Dean and the roles were reversed. Years ago, he’d said some shit about Elika, and she’d overheard him—and I obviously didn’t learn anything from that and ended up hurting a good woman.
My wife was a good woman.
We’d been together a year, and I had expected it to be a nightmare. Instead, it was… nice .
There was an ease with her I hadn’t anticipated. We spent time together, and it never felt forced. She worked at a bistro—not, as I had assumed, as a way to escape our marriage or me, but because she genuinely loved it. I had been wrong about that.
She kept hours that let her be home in the evenings, and more often than not, she cooked—despite my repeated insistence that she could just order from the Palazzo Giordano, our nearby flagship hotel.
But Elysa never took the easy way out, I had learned during our time together. Not with her work, not with our marriage. Not with anything
Then there was the sex.
I’d lied like an asshole when I told Dean we didn’t set the sheets on fire—because we hadn’t just done that. We’d set fucking Rome on fire.
But a relationship needed more than sex, didn’t it? And I had convinced myself that was all Elysa and I had.
Yet now, standing in our bedroom, looking around at the space we had shared—at the absence of her—I wondered if I’d been wrong.
We had more than sex.
We went for walks in the evenings, no matter the weather, because she insisted. I always complained and acted like I was being dragged along. But sometime during that first year together, something shifted.
I started to look forward to them. To her .
“ I love seeing Rome like this ,” she told me when I asked about her penchant for a stroll.
I knew she sometimes walked to the bistro where she worked, which was a good forty-five minutes on foot. Otherwise, she took public transportation. I had offered a car and driver, and she’d turned me down, saying she wasn’t going to sit in Rome traffic and waste her time.
In the mornings, she went for a run, and I joined her for part of the way before heading to the gym. I asked her to join me, but she said, “ I run because I love pasta—not because I like to work out. ”
I looked at her bedside drawer. There was no Thousand Years of Solitude sitting on the table, along with romance, mystery, and Italian-language books.
“You have to mix it up. You can’t eat gourmet food all the time. Sometimes, you need a delicious, perfectly made hotdog.”
“I’m assuming the romance novel is the hotdog in this scenario?”
“Well…we are talking about sausages, aren’t we?” she replied cheekily .
I opened the drawer; it was empty. Not even a piece of lint or forgotten pin or…anything. She’d thoroughly cleaned herself entirely out of the flat.
I opened the closet and saw that she’d left the formal wear I’d bought for her. She’d been honest with me, saying that she couldn’t afford to buy expensive clothes and gave me two choices, “ I don’t have to attend any of these parties or society things. But if you want me to, you’re going to have to buy me the clothes. I don’t have that kind of money.”
She behaved as if she didn’t know I had plenty of money, which she had access to. She had a card, and she could buy whatever the fuck she wanted, even a goddamn car. But she behaved like we were regular people and was careful about how she spent money from the household account. It was refreshing to be with someone who didn’t just buy things for the sake of it, to show them off, to fill some emptiness within.
“The truffles smelled so good, I just had to buy them. But I bought very little, so I didn’t spend thousands of euros or anything,” she said as she grated a black truffle on homemade gnocchi.
“Buy whatever you want, Elysa.” I picked up a thin slice of the truffle and popped it into my mouth. Sono deliziosi !
“I do buy what I want.”
“I have a lot of money and it’s there to be spent.”
“This isn’t about the quantity of euros in your bank account, Dante, it’s about not being wasteful.” She changed the topic by opening a bottle of wine that she’d bought for just fifty euros and was proud of it because it tasted amazing. She was right it did.
Regardless of how we seemed to get along, I just couldn’t see us as a real couple. I understood that part of the resentment I felt toward her was because I’d been forced into this situation because I loved and respected my grandfather. But the other part came because she wasn’t what I expected. I thought I’d be getting some gauche village girl who’d make my life a living hell by being vapid and only interested in the Giordano fortune.
Instead, I got Elysa.
She wanted a job. She wanted to cook. She wanted us to be friends. She wanted us to have sex. She wanted to take care of my Nonno. She wanted to be loved. I knew that. I could see it in the way she was always looking for some sort of acknowledgment from me that I cared about her, that I loved her. I didn’t. I was careful not to give her false hope. She may not think this marriage was temporary, but in my head, it was. Maybe I should’ve said to her from the start that I didn’t see us making it in the long run. We came from worlds that were too different.
Now, Lucia came from a family like the Giordanos and could afford to buy herself clothes and jewelry. Thus, she did not have to struggle with what to wear for what event.
“How formal is this?” Elysa asked me about Nonno’s eighty-fifth birthday.
“Pretty formal.”
“So…like black tie?”
“Yes.”
“So, you know what, can you help me pick out what to wear? Your stylist person left like five outfits.”
I found it endearing that she didn’t care if she wore a big or small designer—she just wanted to avoid embarrassment. However, I also found it annoying, evidence that she was not suited to be my wife.
Lucia would never be worried about embarrassing herself or me. She knew how to handle herself. She’d grown up in elite Roman society.
Elysa grew up in New York with her mother, Ginerva, who, from all accounts, was devout and didn’t appear to have a loving bone in her body. She refused to come to the wedding, saying that Elysa, by marrying a Giordano, just showed her that she wasn’t her daughter.
Elysa’s father, Vittorio, explained that Ginerva had become more and more pious with age. She’d left Vittorio because he made and drank wine, which, according to Ginerva, meant he was turning into an alcoholic. Growing up with a mother like that, I’d expected Elysa to be stuck up, but she wasn’t. She was full of life, hope, and joy.
However, she didn’t seem joyful at all as she walked out of my flat. I’d shattered her. Self-loathing rose within me, especially when she told me about the vineyard. I hadn’t cared, not really. It wasn’t my business what Nonno did with his property. He’d bought the vineyard three decades ago because Vittorio needed a loan. But Nonno would not take the money back from his best friend’s son, and he eventually returned the expensive piece of land in Piedmont to the Costa family. I had assumed that he made a deal with Elysa, and I didn’t think it bothered me until I spoke to Dean, and the words spewed out when I realized that it did.
Elysa telling me that if Nonno had made that a requirement—that she sell herself—she’d have never married me, had been a gut punch. The fact that I thought of her as someone who had offered herself to me as payment made me feel small.
I went back into the living room, poured myself another drink, an Amaro this time, and went out onto the terrace.
The house felt empty without Elysa…more because of the knowledge that she wasn’t coming back.
I’d gotten used to having her around, cooking, doing things, smiling, always… giving . That’s what Nonno had said about her, that she had a big heart and a generous soul. She did, and I’d crushed said heart and put a hole in her soul with my words. I couldn’t take them back—and she was right, I did want a divorce—or at least I thought I did, but when she presented it to me, I’d recoiled at the idea.
Why?
Why hadn’t I grabbed it with both hands and called Lucia because I was free to act on my attraction to her? She’d pretty much told me without saying the exact words that she was open to having an affair with me, but I pretended I didn’t get the message and kept things professional between us.
Whether my marriage was arranged or not, it was real to me for however long it lasted, and it was definitely real to Elysa. The way she went about our lives as a couple made that fact pretty obvious.
Regardless, there was no universe in which I’d sleep with a woman while I was in a relationship with another. It didn’t even have to be marriage; it could be something casual, and I wouldn’t cheat. I believed in monogamy. I believed in being transparent, so the question again was why I hadn’t been open about my intent with Elysa.
Why didn’t I tell her from the start or anywhere in between that I expected us to divorce once Nonno passed away? I’d known his time was short, what with cancer eating away his insides. But I hadn’t done that with Elysa. I’d treated her worse than I treated a woman who graced my bed for a week or two.
I lowered my head, feeling the shame of it. I’d treated my wife worse than I did a one-night stand who knew the stakes. I’d not cheated on her, not physically, but I had thought that Lucia would have made a better wife. That was a kind of cheating on my vows, wasn’t it? Thinking about another woman while your wife was buying truffles, worried she’d bankrupt you because of it?
I ran a hand through my hair.
Porca miseria , I was an asshole.
Yeah, I’d sign the divorce papers, but I’d make some changes. I wanted her to be comfortable, so I’d make sure she got paid for sacrificing a year of her life to keep Nonno happy. And God, he had been!
“You’re a lucky man, Dante. Your wife loves you,” he told me just a few days before he passed away. He was sitting on the terrace, and Elysa had spent her day off with him. I’d joined them for dinner, and now, while Elysa checked in with the nurse on Nonno’s health and medications, I was keeping him company.
“I think it’s you she loves, Nonno,” I teased.
He shook his head somberly. “She respects me. She takes care of me, so you know I’m taken care of and don’t have to worry.”
It was true. Since Elysa took over managing his care, I felt at ease because I was certain she would watch him like a hawk.
“I knew you’d be happy with Elio’s granddaughter.”
I patted his hand and nodded. It wasn’t a lie. I wasn’t unhappy with Elysa. I wasn’t in love but content, especially since I knew there was a deadline to this marriage.
The truth was that I hoped Nonno lived years and years and if that meant being in a marriage without love, I was okay with that.
But the doctors had given him months a year and a half ago, which had whittled down to weeks and days. In the last days, I could see in his eyes that he was ready to go, especially since he felt happy to have settled his only grandchild.
“I’m very happy with Elysa,” I told him, exaggerating a little. “You were right about her and how we’d be as a couple.”
When he died, he’d believed that was the truth. And now, not a week later, I’d created a situation by not keeping my mouth shut, where my wife had handed me divorce papers.
Accidenti! This was no way to honor my Nonno.
I felt like shit.
I felt confused.
I thought I’d be happy if Elysa asked for the divorce, removing the burden from me—but I wasn’t even remotely pleased.
In fact, I felt like I’d lost something vital.
In the span of a week, I’d lost the man who’d been my parent and the woman who’d become a friend and companion.
No, I didn’t feel pleased or relieved. I felt guilty and foolish.
Order That’s Amore .