Chapter Fifty-Eight Telling the Family
Sofia cried when they told her, loudly and without embarrassment, hugging Elena so hard she nearly knocked the wind from her.
Marco, when Dante informed him with unusual, almost boyish nervousness, simply nodded once and said, "About time, Signore," with the faintest, rarest smile Elena had ever seen cross his face.
Antonio Rossi wept outright, holding his daughter's hands in both of his, apologizing again for everything that had come before, and Elena, for the first time since the night in his study, felt the last of her old resentment soften into something like forgiveness — not because he'd earned it fully, but because she understood, now, watching him grip her hands with such naked gratitude, that people were allowed to be flawed and frightened and still, eventually, find their way toward being better.
"I am going to be a grandfather," Antonio said, wonder threaded through his voice, "because of a marriage I nearly destroyed you both with. I don't deserve this kind of grace, Elena."
"None of us get exactly what we deserve," she said gently. "Some of us get better than that, if we're lucky enough."
Dante's family — the wider Moretti relations, uncles and cousins Elena had spent the first months of her marriage carefully learning to navigate — received the news with a warmth that surprised her, toasts raised late into the night, Dante's uncle clasping his shoulder with something like genuine pride.
"Your father would have been insufferable about this," the uncle said, laughing.
"A grandchild. He'd have renamed half his properties by morning. "
"My father," Dante said quietly, "would have been a very different man with this child than he was with me. I intend to make sure of it, regardless."
Later that night, alone in their bedroom, Elena curled against Dante's chest and felt him press his palm flat against her stomach again, as he'd taken to doing every night since she'd told him — a small, unconscious ritual of a man still catching up to his own happiness.
"Are you scared?" she asked quietly.
"Terrified," he admitted. "I'm terrified I'll be my father, without meaning to.
I'm terrified of every enemy I've ever made finding their way to this child someday.
I'm terrified, honestly, of loving something this much, because I've learned that the things I love most are the things I'm most afraid of losing.
" His hand stilled over her stomach. "But I have never, not once since the night I walked into your father's study, regretted a single choice that led me here.
Not the debt. Not the danger. Not any of it.
So I'll be terrified, Elena, and I'll do it anyway.
That's what loving you taught me how to do. "