Chapter Thirty-Seven Reconnecting
With the danger finally lifted, Elena found herself, for the first time in nearly a year, with room in her days for something other than survival — and the first thing she did with that room was call the four friends she'd gone quiet on since her engagement.
They met at a small café Elena used to frequent before her father's debts consumed her old life entirely, and for the first ten minutes, the reunion was stilted, awkward, thick with all the things unsaid across a year of silence.
"We heard you got married," said Priya, the boldest of the group, watching Elena over the rim of her coffee cup with careful, assessing eyes. "Suddenly. To someone in a rather — notable family."
"I did." Elena turned her cup slowly on its saucer, aware of Marco waiting discreetly at a table near the door, aware of how strange her life must look from the outside now.
"It wasn't the wedding I imagined for myself, if I'm honest. It started as something closer to a business arrangement than a love story. "
"And now?"
Elena thought of Dante at breakfast that morning, burning eggs with a determination that bordered on stubborn pride, humming without realizing it, pressing a kiss to her temple on his way out the door.
"Now it's the truest love story I could have imagined," she said simply.
"It just took the long way getting there. "
Her friends exchanged glances — surprise, she realized, not at the sentiment but at how easily, how genuinely, she'd said it — and slowly, over the next two hours, the old ease between them returned, stories tumbling out about the year they'd missed of each other's lives, laughter returning in a register Elena hadn't used in months.
"I missed this," she admitted, walking out of the café afterward, Marco falling into step at a respectful distance. "I missed feeling like myself, instead of just Signora Moretti."
"You don't have to choose between the two," Priya said, squeezing her hand before they parted. "You clearly haven't. You're still exactly who you always were, Elena. You've just added something enormous to it."
Elena carried that thought home with her, turning it over the way she'd once turned over Dante's threats in her father's study, and found it settled into her chest like something she'd been missing without quite knowing it: the reminder that becoming a wife, even a Moretti wife, had never actually required losing herself.