Chapter 4
BUON APPETITO
EVAN
My apartment building smells like money and restraint.
Polished stone.
Citrus cleaner.
A faintly floral scent that reminds me of a high-end hotel.
The elevator opens directly into my apartment—no hallway, no neighbors, no friction. Just glass and views that stretch across the city, as if it belongs to me.
It does not.
But living in Nob Hill, which is the metaphorical Ivory Tower of the city, it feels that way sometimes.
It’s been a long, emotional day by the time I get to my apartment, and all I want is to go to fucking bed after I drink some scotch.
But I’m starving, and Massimo, an old friend—all the way from Exeter, the prep school we went to in New Hampshire—is coming over to drag me out into a cold spring night in San Francisco.
I throw my jacket on the couch just to make the place look lived in, because my immaculate apartment feels vaguely accusatory.
My housekeeper has already been through, which is why everything is buttoned up to suffocation.
Counters are wiped.
The bed is made with hospital corners.
The clothes, as per requirement, are laundered, dry-cleaned, ironed, and stacked in my closet, like we’re in a Hugo Boss store.
Fresh flowers, various sizes of arrangements in the living and dining rooms.
I loosen my tie next, contemplate tossing it on the marble kitchen island, but this is a favorite, a Pucci that my grandma gave me, so I gently set it on my coat on the back of the couch.
My phone rings. It’s the concierge downstairs. “Let him up,” I say when he tells me its Massimo.
I am walking to the bar in the far corner of the large open space when the elevator door opens.
I pull out two whiskey glasses and a bottle of Glenlivet, 15 years.
Massimo comes in and looks around. “Seriously, amico*, you need some fucking art on your walls. The place looks like your hospital.”
“The hospital has art on the walls,” I reply as I fill my glass and take a long draw.
Honestly, I haven’t had time to think about interior design. Since I moved from New York to San Francisco, it’s been busy.
I left my apartment in the West Village as it is—because I have friends and family there I intend to visit, and really, who doesn’t want to go to New York at any time of year? That means I have to buy everything for this place, from furniture to art to—you name it.
I’ve hired an interior designer, and they’ll fix things up and make it look inhabited in a couple of weeks.
I’ve already sent them a list of artists and pieces I like, along with the kind of feeling I want the space to give me.
Simply saying I want it to feel like home never quite cuts it, at least in my experience.
For a place to feel lived in, though, you have to live in it for a while. I know it’ll get there—it’s just going to take time to become…cozy.
“Are you saying the hospital is more cheerful than your apartment?” He saunters up to me and picks up the second glass of whiskey.
“I think so.” I raise my glass in a toast, and he clinks it with his.
“This woman I know is an interior designer,” he offers. “She can help you.”
“Did you have sex with her?”
He raises both eyebrows. “How else would I know her?”
Massimo Pasinetti is a manwhore. He admits it, too—though he prefers to call himself a Don Giovanni, a legendary lover. Same difference.
“No, thank you, I have an interior designer already.” I walk to the couch and sink in. “And I want to steer clear of any woman from your past. I was there when what’s her name…the Graziano girl? She tried to break a bottle of Franciacorta on your head.”
Massimo ends relationships poorly, the short ones as well as the long ones—and I use the term long generously.
He sits across from me in a matching armchair and crosses his ankles. “Natalia was crazy…she’s on happy pills now, and the last time I saw her, she even smiled at me.”
“So, what you’re saying is that any ex of yours needs to be medicated to be civil to you?”
Massimo tilts his head and nods thoughtfully. “I think so.”
I laugh, and he joins me.
“So…your father called, and when I told him I was seeing you for dinner, he got very excited.”
“Cazzo! I don’t need this shit today, Mass.”
Massimo watches me over the rim of his glass. “Amico, you’ve got to straighten things out with Arabella.”
“There’s nothing to straighten out.”
“Well—”
“They want me to propose and set a wedding date. Would you marry someone you’re not in love with?” I down the rest of my scotch, now feeling completely drained.
Massimo chuckles. “Do I look like the marrying kind? Thankfully, my family doesn’t give two shits about me because I have an older brother who is married and has two sons—so I get none of that heir nonsense. Otherwise, they’d be on my ass like they’re on yours.”
I rest against the sofa and close my eyes for a long moment. “Leo needs to fucking go ahead and have some kids, already.”
“You’re the older brother, Evan. You know how these things work.”
I make a noise somewhere between a sigh and a growl.
“What’s your problem with Arabella?” he asks.
Problem? None.
Arabella Gentile comes from an old Italian family and has worked for Vincenzo Wine & Oils for a decade. She used to be engaged to another Italian scion, but that fell apart because he cheated on her, or at least that’s the story. I’ve never asked.
Now, her parents and mine would love to see her married to me.
Arabella is beautiful. Smart. Sharp. She’s an asset at Vincenzo Wine & Oils, and honestly, marrying someone like her will take the pressure off me because I chose the wrong profession.
Leo, my brother, likes working with her in the company but refrains from commenting about her suitability as a sister-in-law.
My parents appear to like her—but then do narcissists ever like anyone? They do say, loudly and often, that she fits well into the family.
My grandfather, now that my grandmother is gone, is pushing hard for me to marry Arabella—something Nonna would never have allowed.
She was the soft brake on his will, the quiet voice that reminded him that legacy means more than continuity.
Without her, Nonno has turned practical, urgent, and afraid of time slipping through his fingers.
He wants certainty and a woman he trusts at my side before his health falters further.
He wants to know that the family, the vineyards, the name—we—will be anchored before he’s gone.
And because I’m the older grandson, the one he’s always looked to first, the weight of that responsibility lands squarely on me.
Nonna wanted something different for Leo and me.
She wanted us to marry for ourselves, not for strategy or optics, not the way she had.
She loved Nonno deeply, but she always said they were lucky—that love had grown where duty planted the seed.
She didn’t want us to gamble our happiness on the same odds.
Leo, thankfully, never had to fight that battle. He fell in love with the daughter of a family friend we grew up with, and when they married just a year ago, Nonna was still alive to see it. She was delighted—relieved, even—that at least one of us had chosen easily, without pressure or compromise.
That leaves me. The older one. The complicated one. The one Nonno is trying desperately to settle before the clock runs out.
“According to your father, neither of you is getting younger, and you need to marry Arabella before her childbearing years run out.”
I roll my eyes in disgust. “My father is an asshole.”
“That is the truth.”
Massimo knows my father well. He’s a senior executive at one of the largest wine distributors in North America—Bella Vite, his family’s business—and he does regular business with my father.
Rodolfo Vincenzo talks more to his business partners than he ever has to his own children. My mother, Imelda Vincenzo née Montalti, another old-money Italian family, at least tries to have a relationship with her offspring.
Ultimately, the only people Leo and I have ever truly cared about in our family are our grandparents. It’s almost baffling, considering the same people—my father’s parents—raised him, and later helped raise Leo and me. And yet we all turned out nothing alike.
Massimo raises a brow. “Arabella is moving to the US, I hear.”
I nod. She has decided to work from the Vincenzo Oils & Wine headquarters in Healdsburg—I think in part to get close to me.
“She’s going to move in a few months.”
Massimo stands up. “Perfect! Gives you time to fuck around.”
“Jesus, Mass!”
Massimo claps his hands once. “Come on, amico. I’m starving.”
We go to Cotogna. The ma?tre d’ knows Massimo by name—after all, his company supplies their wine.
We’ve barely sat down at the small table when our server materializes almost instantly.
“Wine?” Massimo asks, already scanning the list.
“You’re the expert.”
He narrows his storm gray eyes. “You sure you don’t have an opinion?”
“I have an opinion on a brain tumor…but wine? All yours.”
He orders a 2019 Col d’Orcia Brunello di Montalcino, a damn good year in Tuscany.
I know that much—after all, I grew up with vineyards and cellar talk.
I know this wine better than most because I know the owner of Col d’Orcia, Count Francesco Marone Cinzano.
He comes from the old Cinzano martini family and runs a biodynamic vineyard.
His sons are expanding the business to include beer that’s fermented in barriques, wine barrels.
When the wine arrives, Massimo sniffs, swirls, tastes, and approves.
“So, how was your first day at work?” he asks as the server fills our glasses.
I laugh without humor. “Disastrous.”
He arches a brow, amusement flickering in his gaze. “What did you do?”
Massimo knows me well. I’m not in a good place, not since Nonna fell sick and he saw me at the funeral, a complete mess, even if outwardly I held my own.
“I berated a nurse.”
Massimo pauses mid-sip. “You?” That one word oozes sarcasm.
“I humiliated her. In front of the entire OR.” I stare into my glass. “Called her incompetent.”
He whistles low. “Was she?”
I give a firm shake of my head. “Not at all.” I drink some of the Count’s excellent wine. “It was unforgivable.”
“And?”
“And she handled it with more grace than I deserved.”
Massimo studies me. “What did you do?”
“Apologized furiously.”
The server returns, and we peruse the menu. I order the pappardelle with duck ragu, while Massimo gets what he always does when we’re here: the pork chops, which they do very well.
If I thought he’d drop the subject of my apologizing to Navya, I would be na?ve. I am not, though, and I know Massimo as well as he knows me.
“She forgive you?”
“Yes…but not because of my apology.” I release a weary sigh. “The head nurse, that’s no-nonsense Carmen, she said that the nurse…ah…Navya, that’s her name, doesn’t hold a grudge.”
He smirks at me like I am the plot twist he’s been hoping for. “Interesting.”
“No. No. Nothing like that.”
I don’t tell him that I invited her to dinner as a way for her to prove to me that she accepts my apology. That’s such thin brew that I doubt I can say it with a straight face.
The food arrives—handmade pasta, perfect bread, olive oil that tastes like my childhood summers in Italy.
Nonna should be here, I think, suddenly. She would have loved this place. She would have complained that it wasn’t as good as what we get in Tuscany and then eaten everything anyway.
I set my fork down, as grief clamps its fists around my heart.
“She’s gone,” I say quietly.
Massimo’s expression shifts. He sobers. “Si*.”
I take a sip of wine, mostly to have something to do because my hands are trembling a little. “There’s a hole inside of me, which I know will never fill.”
Massimo doesn’t joke—he knows that Nonna is…was important to me.
“And now I’m terrified about Nonno,” I admit. “He looks…smaller. Like losing her took something vital out of him.”
“He’s old,” my friend says gently. “That’s what happens.”
I set my wine glass down and pick up my fork. I twirl the pasta on it. “He wants me to marry Arabella.”
“Si.” Massimo huffs out a breath. “We’re not in the eighteenth century, Evan, you don’t have to marry a woman you don’t want to…or because your grandfather might die.”
Massimo’s gaze flicks over automatically, then back to me. “You seeing someone?”
That’s his way of asking if I’m fucking anyone on the regular. Unlike my friend, I practice serial monogamy.
I shake my head.
There hasn’t been anyone in a while…in over six months. I’ve been busy with the move, and then Nonna fell sick, so I was doing the whole US to Florence thing on a regular basis…and I still wasn’t there when she passed.
“Maybe…a distraction is never a bad thing,” he suggests.
But the thing is, I am distracted by a nurse with steady hands and bright honey-brown eyes.
We move away from the sensitive topics to lighter ones…like football. In no time at all, we’re arguing about Milan versus Inter like it’s a matter of personal integrity. Which, as those who love football know, it is.
After dinner, his car takes him to his place in Marin, while I walk to my place.
The city is cool and sharp, just as you expect San Francisco to be. I stand for a moment, Nob Hill rising around me, and think again about Navya.
She’s been on my mind all day.
On impulse, I pull out my phone.
I type.
Delete.
Type again.
Evan: Wednesday. Apology dinner.
There, Wednesday is not date night, so she won’t misunderstand.
A pause.
Three dots.
My chest tightens in anticipation as I stand still on the sidewalk.
Navya: This coming Wednesday?
I smile. She’s precise.
Me: Yes.
Navya: Okay.
Me: I’ll send you details about the restaurant. Any food restrictions I should know about?
Diamine*! That sounds a bit too cliché, doesn’t it?
Navya: I’ll eat anything…except tongue. I draw the line.
Someone brushes by me, and I notice I’m standing in everyone’s way on the sidewalk. I step aside, devotedly staring at my screen.
My phone has never been this interesting.
Me: Damn! The place I was thinking does tongue really well.
Navya responds immediately: Also, eel. Too oily.
Me: There goes another favorite restaurant of mine.
Long pause.
Did I go too far? I read through the messages to make sure I didn’t say anything inappropriate.
Was tongue a metaphor for…was eel?
Navya: Doctor, I’ll actually be fine with tacos from the truck in the parking lot.
I type: Absolutely not! I’m already fantasizing about you cutting a snobbish server to size.
I go back, delete, delete, delete. I don’t need to be using the word “fantasize” in connection with the delectable Navya Rana.
Me: Absolutely not! A deal is a deal.
She sends me a thumbs-up emoji. I read through our messages one more time and then slide my phone into my coat pocket.
I walk home with a spring in my step.
* Friend (Italian)
* Yes (Italian)
* Damn (Italian)