Chapter Forty-Four What He Never Says Out Loud
It was a small thing, the night she found him standing in the doorway of the room that had once been his mother's — a room he never entered, that the staff kept dusted and closed out of some unspoken reverence Elena had never questioned.
"You don't have to explain," she said softly, coming to stand beside him in the doorway. "I can leave, if you want to be alone with this."
"Stay." He said it immediately, reaching for her hand without looking away from the room — a small sitting room, faded now, a piano in the corner gone slightly out of tune from years of silence.
"She used to play, badly, same as she sang.
I used to sit under that piano as a boy and pretend I didn't notice how bad she was, because she looked so happy doing it. "
"You've never shown me this room."
"I've never shown anyone this room." He finally looked at her, something raw and unguarded in his expression that she'd learned, over the months, was reserved only for her — the version of Dante Moretti that existed nowhere else in the world except in the quiet, private hours they built together.
"I think I've been waiting for someone I trusted enough to let inside it.
I didn't realize, until just now, standing here with you, that I already had. "
Elena's throat tightened. "Play something for me. Even badly. Especially badly."
He laughed — surprised, unguarded, a sound she'd come to treasure more than almost anything else about him — and let her pull him toward the piano, where he picked out a clumsy, half-remembered melody with more affection than skill, humming along under his breath the way she suspected his mother once had, and Elena sat beside him on the bench, her head against his shoulder, thinking that this — this ordinary, unguarded, badly-played moment — was worth more than every dramatic declaration that had come before it.
"I love you," she said quietly, into the small silence after the last off-key note faded. "Not the version of you that burns down restaurants to protect me. This version. The one who still misses his mother enough to keep her piano in tune for a room he can't bring himself to enter."
Dante's hands stilled on the keys. When he turned to look at her, his eyes were suspiciously bright. "Nobody has ever loved that version of me," he said, rough. "I wasn't certain it still existed, most days, until you started looking for it."
"I found it the day you told me her name," Elena said softly. "I've just been waiting for you to trust it enough to let it stay."