Chapter Nine
"ABSOLUTELY NOT," AISLINN said.
"You haven't heard the plan."
"I've seen the street." She pointed out the window at the row of boutiques gliding past, the kind with one handbag in the window and no visible price anywhere, because the price was a private matter between the handbag and its lawyer.
"Valerio, people get arrested for walking too slowly on this street. "
"Then we'll walk quickly," said Louis, already unbuckling.
Traitor.
It was Sunday, the morning after their first night in the penthouse, and the expedition was entirely the grocery bag's fault.
Aislinn had unpacked it while the boys slept in, their entire former life in one bag and one backpack, two small shirts, her one good dress with the satin ribbon still sewn to the waist, and she'd turned around to find Valerio standing in the doorway watching her fold it all into a single drawer of a closet the size of her old kitchen.
He hadn't said anything. He'd just gotten that look, the apartment look, the one she and Louis had scrambled to chase off his face the night before, right before the banging on the door started, and by the time the coffee was poured he'd already made a call and the car was already downstairs.
The first store swallowed them whole. It was all cream marble and violin music and air that had been personally scented, and the woman who glided up to meet them took one look at Aislinn's coat, then one look at her shoes, and performed a smile that involved no part of her face above the mouth.
"The staff entrance," she said helpfully, "is around the back."
Aislinn opened her mouth to say it was fine, it was an honest mistake, she'd made the same one in mirrors, but she never got the chance, because Valerio had come in from parking-adjacent conversation with his driver, and the temperature of the marble dropped several degrees.
"She isn't staff." His voice stayed low, almost pleasant. It didn't need to be anything else. "She's the reason I'm about to spend more in an afternoon than this branch clears in a quarter. Or was, until you spoke."
The saleswoman's face attempted some very fast math and lost its balance somewhere in the middle. A different woman appeared as if summoned by the smell of commission, older, wiser, already reaching for a tailor's tape.
"Madame," the new one said warmly, to Aislinn, "may I say, that coat does you a disservice."
"That's what I keep telling her," said Louis.
What followed was, Aislinn would think later, less like shopping and more like a heist in reverse.
Dresses came in armfuls. Shoes came in flocks.
A rack appeared for Louis, who submitted to being fitted like a man being knighted, then went quietly pale reading a price tag and turned it face-down so his mother wouldn't see, which she saw, which broke her heart, which was interrupted by the arrival of a blue gown so beautiful it seemed rude.
"I can't," she whispered to it.
"You can," said the wise saleswoman.
"You will," said Valerio, from a chair he'd occupied like a throne, Louis stationed beside him, the two of them presiding over the fitting room traffic like judges at a very expensive dog show.
"This is too much. All of it, it's too much, it's so, so expensive, and I don't need—"
"Aislinn." He said her name and waited until she stopped fluttering. "Eight years, I bought you nothing. No birthdays. No Christmases. Not one winter coat." His voice stayed even, but something underneath it wasn't. "I'm not buying you dresses, ma belle. I'm paying a debt. Let me."
Well.
What was a woman supposed to do with that, except cry a little in a fitting room and then buy the shoes.
She came out in the blue gown just once, to see if it fit.
The violin music kept playing. Nothing else in the store made a sound.
Louis's mouth had fallen open, the wise saleswoman had pressed a hand to her own heart, genuinely moved despite herself, and Valerio had gone very still in his chair, and stayed still, for long enough that Aislinn began nervously checking the gown for missing pieces.
"What? Is it wrong? It's wrong."
"Cara." It left him low, involuntary, in his father's language, and he didn't seem to notice he'd switched. He rose from the chair. "Turn around."
She turned, wobbled on the borrowed heels, and was caught, one large hand at her waist, steadying nothing because the world had already stopped, and in the mirror she watched him look at her the way he'd looked at her across an orange, across a ballroom, across eight years.
"We'll take it," he told the room, without looking away from her.
"Papa," Louis stage-whispered, "you should also say she's beautiful. Out loud. It's polite."
"Your mother," Valerio said, still holding her eyes in the mirror, "is the most beautiful thing this street has ever seen, and the street should be grateful."
"Okay," Louis approved. "That was good."
They emerged two hours later into the late afternoon like a small victorious army, bags in every available hand, driver included, Louis wearing his new coat out of the store and carrying, with immense dignity, a tiny cashmere scarf that had been purchased, at his insistence and his father's instant capitulation, for a one-eared rabbit.
THAT NIGHT, MINNA COLLECTED Louis for a sleepover she described as a rematch and Louis described as a reckoning, and the penthouse went quiet, and Aislinn put the blue gown on again for no reason at all.
She was still in front of the mirror when Valerio came to find her.
He stopped in the doorway. She watched him stop, in the mirror, this man who never hesitated at anything, and she felt the look travel over her like a hand.
"It's silly," she said, suddenly shy. "There's nowhere to wear it. I just wanted—"
"There's here."
He crossed the room slowly, giving her every chance to laugh it off, and she didn't laugh it off, and his hands settled at her waist from behind, and in the mirror they looked like a painting somebody rich would fight over.
"Do you know what I thought," he said against her ear, "when you came out of that fitting room?"
"That the tailoring was—"
"That I wasted eight years." His mouth found the slope of her shoulder, taking its time, and her breath went thin. "And that I intend to waste nothing else. Ever."
The zipper was a long, slow argument he won inch by inch, his eyes on hers in the mirror the entire time, and the gown that had silenced a boutique pooled on the bedroom floor like it understood it had done its job.
She turned in his arms then, and it was her hands that pulled his shirt free, her rising up on bare toes, brave the way she was only ever brave with him, and he made a low wrecked sound and stopped letting her lead.
He laid her down in the middle of the enormous bed and took her apart with a patience that bordered on cruelty, kisses pressed down her body, slow, deliberate, one debt at a time, every gasp of his name met with more, until she was begging in broken half-words, and only then, only then, did he finally move over her and into her, and the two of them found the rhythm that eight years had somehow failed to erase.
"Look at me," he said, when her eyes fluttered shut, and she did, and what she saw there undid her faster than anything his body was doing. "There you are. Ma belle. There you are."
She broke first, with his name and her nails and a sob that had joy all through it, and he followed her down with his face buried in her hair, shaking again, this man who wasn't scared of anything, and afterward they lay tangled in the dark listening to each other's heartbeats negotiate their way back to normal.
"Valerio?"
"Mm."
"I kept the tags on the other dresses." A pause. "In case."
He laughed. She felt it before she heard it, a low earthquake under her cheek, the rarest sound she knew, and she lifted her head to watch it happen to his face.
"Tomorrow," he said, recovering, pressing a kiss to her hair, "we're going back for the rest of the street."
"Valerio!"