Chapter Twenty Eight #3
There are doors newly opened tonight, and then there are rooms I have no intention of entering with my sons while my wife’s name still sits between us.
Tomasso does not retreat.
“She would not have wanted it.”
“You do not know what your mother would have wanted.”
“Yes, we do,” Matteo says quietly.
My eyes move to him.
He does not flinch.
“Mamma hated waste,” he says.
I stare at him.
Tomasso lets out a humorless little breath. “That is one way to put it.”
Matteo looks down at his glass, turning it once by the stem. “She hated wasted food. Wasted time. Wasted rooms. Wasted happiness. She used to say people made misery sacred because they were too frightened to admit they could survive it.”
For a moment, I cannot speak.
Because I hear Anna in that.
Not the words exactly, perhaps. But the sense of them. The impatience. The refusal to let anyone make a shrine out of suffering if there was life still demanding to be lived.
“She was speaking generally,” I say.
Tomasso gives me a look. “She was married to you. Nothing she said was general.”
That almost earns a smile from Matteo.
Not from me.
I lean back in my chair and study them both. “Who exactly are you talking about?”
Tomasso opens his mouth.
Matteo answers first. “We are talking about you.”
It’s a careful answer.
More dangerous than if he had lied badly.
I look between them again. “What do you think you know?”
“That there is a woman,” Tomasso says.
“There have been women.”
“Not like this.”
The room quiets again.
I do not answer.
Because he is right.
There have been women, yes. I am not a monk, and I never pretended to be one. My sons are grown men. They know this, even if none of us has ever felt the need to discuss my private life over dinner.
But not here.
Never here.
This may not be the home that I lived in with Anna. These may not be Anna’s gardens or her table or the rooms she chose, argued over, changed, hated, loved. But I chose them with her in mind when we moved here.
I chose a home Anna would love. I had this big table made with the thought of how much Anna loved filling our table at home with family. I planted her favorite flowers in the garden.
I have never brought a woman to my home, not since Anna.
Until Victoria.
Tomasso watches me with too much of his mother’s boldness. “You brought her home.”
“I did.”
“That means something.”
“It means I brought her home.”
“Papà.”
I look away first, and I dislike myself for it.
Matteo’s voice is softer when he speaks.
“We are not asking you to replace Mamma.”
My gaze snaps back to his.
His expression changes, not with fear, but with care.
“No one could,” he says.
The answer is immediate. “No.”
“We know.”
Tomasso nods once. “We know that better than anyone.”
I breathe in through my nose.
Slowly.
That is the thing I forget when guilt makes me stupid. They know exactly what Anna’s absence feels like because they have lived with it too. They are not outsiders peering into grief they cannot understand. They are not asking some careless thing of me because they have forgotten her.
They remember.
They remember everything.
“She was your mother,” I say.
“Yes,” Matteo says. “And she was your wife.”
The same thing he said before, almost.
But it feels different now somehow.
Tomasso leans forward, forearms on the edge of the table. “She loved you. She also knew you were impossible, possessive, arrogant, and irritatingly dramatic when you decided to suffer in silence.”
Matteo adds, “She said that last part often.”
I look at him.
He lifts one shoulder. “Not always in those words.”
Despite myself, something in my chest loosens.
Tomasso sees it and pushes.
“She would have hated you turning loyalty into loneliness.”
The words are precise. Like a bullet that’s found its mark.
My jaw works once.
“That’s enough.”
“No,” Tomasso says. “It’s not.”
Matteo looks at his brother, then at me. “He’s right.”
I sit very still.
“She would not have wanted you to spend the rest of your life alone just to prove she mattered.”
I say nothing.
Because there is no defense against that.
Not one that does not make me sound like exactly the kind of fool Anna would have cut apart with one look.
Tomasso continues, quieter now.
“She mattered. She matters. To us. To you. That does not change because someone else walks through the door.”
A long silence follows.
This time, I do not fill it with an order or a correction.
Matteo studies me for a moment, then says, “When we were young, I used to think you would marry again.”
That surprises me enough to look at him fully.
“You did?”
He nods.
“I hated the idea,” Tomasso says.
Matteo glances at him. “You hated many ideas.”
“I was seventeen and angry.”
“You were angry before seventeen.”
Tomasso ignores him and keeps his eyes on me. “I hated the idea. I thought if you ever looked at another woman, it would mean you had moved on from her.”
His mouth tightens.
“Then years passed. And you didn’t. Not really. You lived. You worked. You raised us. You ruled everyone. But you didn’t… I don’t know.”
“Let anyone in,” Matteo says.
Tomasso nods once. “Yes.”
I look at the table.
“I had you,” I say. “It is enough.”
“You did,” Matteo says. “You still do.”
“But, no, we are not enough to be your whole life,” Tomasso says.
The words hit me hard.
Not because they are cruel, but because they are generous.
My sons, sitting in front of me, now more grown than I realized even just a few moments ago.
“I never wanted you to think I had forgotten her,” I say.
Tomasso’s face shifts.
For once, his answer comes without humor.
“How could we ever think that?”
“Not even once,” Matteo says.
I look at them.
They mean it.
There is something terribly merciful in that.
Tomasso sits back. “Honestly, there were times I wished you could forget her for five minutes.”
Matteo’s mouth curves faintly. “Usually, when you were standing in the garden looking tragic.”
“I do not stand in the garden looking tragic.”
My sons look at each other, then at me, looking like mirror images of each other.
I exhale through my nose. “Careful.”
Tomasso smiles, but it fades quickly.
“She would have wanted you to be happy,” he says.
The words are simple.
Too simple, maybe.
But Tomasso looks uncomfortable saying them, which makes them matter more.
“She would have wanted you to be loved,” Matteo says. “And she would have wanted you to love.”
I close my eyes for one brief second.
Anna would have said that love is not a finite resource. She would have said, loudly and in a huff, that men in my family have always mistaken suffering for honor. She would have been right.
“I do not know what this is,” I say.
It is the closest I can come to saying Victoria’s name.
Both of them understand anyway.
“You don’t have to know yet,” Matteo says.
Tomasso’s brows lift. “Though if you are brooding this badly at dinner, I assume it is not nothing.”
I give him a look.
He smiles faintly. “There. That expression. Very romantic.”
Matteo says, “Terrifying, actually.”
“It can be both.”
“Enough,” I say.
But there is no real threat in it, and they both hear that too.
For a moment, we sit with the strange newness of all of this. Anna between us, Victoria somewhere beyond the walls of this house.
I pick up my wine again.
This time, I drink.
Then I set it down and look at them.
“Your mother would also tell both of you to mind your own business.”
Tomasso’s smile returns, sharper now. “No, she would not.”
Matteo shakes his head. “She would have asked for details.”
“She would have demanded details,” Tomasso corrects.
I laugh.
“She would have liked Victoria,” he adds.
My gaze moves to him.
“You haven’t met her.”
“Presumably.”
“And when is that going to change?” Matteo asks.
“Enough,” I say, but it’s said with amusement.
For the first time tonight and in a long time, the house does not feel like a place where the dead are kept untouched.
It feels like a place where my sons remember their mother clearly enough to argue with me in her name.
Anna would have loved that.
God help me, she would have loved it.
And Tomasso is right.
She would have loved Victoria.