Chapter Forty-Nine Three Days of Nothing
They stayed at the lake house three days, and Elena would later think of it as the truest honeymoon they never officially had — no ceremony, no watching crowd, no debt hanging over either of their heads.
Just mornings spent tangled together, unwilling to leave the warmth of the bed; afternoons spent on the water in a battered canoe Dante insisted, wrongly, that he knew how to paddle; evenings spent cooking together in the small kitchen, Elena finally teaching him — patiently, laughing at every mistake — how to manage a stovetop without setting off alarms.
"You're a natural," she told him, deeply sarcastic, as he successfully plated two servings of pasta without incident for the first time in his life.
"I told you I contain multitudes."
"You contain exactly one multitude, and it took three days of dedicated instruction to locate it.
" She kissed the sauce stain at the corner of his mouth before he could wipe it away, laughing when he caught her wrist and turned the kiss into something slower, deeper, unhurried by anything except their own wanting.
They made love that night with the windows open to the sound of the lake, slow and unhurried in a way that had nothing to do with survival or fear or claiming anything from anyone — simply two people who had chosen each other, again, the way Dante had promised he would every morning for the rest of his life.
Afterward, tangled together beneath a single sheet, the night air cool against damp skin, Elena traced idle patterns over his chest and felt, for the first time since the night in her father's study, entirely and uncomplicatedly happy.
"I used to think happiness was something that happened to other people," she admitted quietly. "People whose lives didn't have debts and threats and mafia husbands attached to them."
"And now?"
"Now I think happiness was always going to require exactly this much complication, for me.
I just didn't know it yet." She propped herself up, studying his face in the moonlight streaming through the open window.
"I wouldn't undo any of it, Dante. Not the study, not the wedding, not even the fear. Because all of it led here."
He pulled her down against his chest, pressing a kiss to her hair, and they fell asleep to the sound of water against the dock, tangled together, unhurried, exactly where they'd both, without ever quite admitting it aloud, always wanted to end up.