Chapter Thirty-Nine While Hes Away
The business trip came without warning — five days in Milan, negotiations Dante couldn't delegate, the first real separation of their marriage since the wedding — and Elena discovered, within the first day alone at Larkspur Row, exactly how much of her life had quietly rearranged itself around his presence.
She wandered the halls that first evening feeling the particular hollowness of a house too large for one person, texting him at odd hours simply to fill the silence, laughing at his replies — dry, affectionate, occasionally scandalous in ways that made Greta raise an eyebrow whenever Elena laughed too suddenly over her phone at breakfast.
The hotel bed is enormous and entirely wasted without you, he wrote, the second night. I keep reaching for you before I remember you're an ocean and a continent away.
Only Milan, not an ocean away, she wrote back, smiling helplessly at her phone. Though it does feel considerably farther when I'm the one lying in it.
Four more days. A pause, then: I miss you in ways I don't have adequate vocabulary for, tesoro. I've never missed anyone the way I miss you. I didn't know it was possible to feel someone's absence this physically.
She filled the days with the things she'd missed during the year of danger and adjustment — long lunches with her reconnected friends, an afternoon spent finally teaching herself the piano in his mother's sitting room, badly, laughing at her own mistakes the way he so often laughed at his own in the kitchen.
She called her father twice, conversations still careful but warming by degrees, the old resentment softening now into something closer to weary, complicated forgiveness.
By the fourth night, unable to sleep in a bed that felt too large and too quiet, she called him past midnight, and he answered on the first ring, voice rough with exhaustion and something warmer underneath it.
"You're still awake."
"I can't sleep without you. I've apparently become entirely dependent on a man who burns eggs and hums off-key." She curled into the pillows, smiling at the low, tired laugh that answered her. "Tell me about your day. Tell me anything. I just want to hear your voice."
He talked for nearly an hour — negotiations, exhaustion, a funny story about a business partner's disastrous attempt at English — and Elena listened with her eyes closed, memorizing the particular cadence of him, until sleep finally found her somewhere in the middle of his voice, the phone still warm against her ear.