7. Ysabelle
— ? —
Ysabelle
The nausea comes in waves, and I’ve learned to wait them out.
I’m kneeling on Remedios’s bathroom tiles at six in the morning, one hand braced against the cool porcelain, the other pressed flat to my stomach as if I can calm the storm there through sheer will.
The retching has stopped, but my body hasn’t gotten the memo yet.
It keeps clenching, keeps trying to expel whatever offense it’s imagined.
The baby doesn’t care that its father is across the city, probably waking up alone in our bed, or that I haven’t slept more than four hours at a stretch in nine days. The baby just wants saltines and ginger ale and for me to stop crying, because crying makes the nausea worse.
I flush, rinse my mouth, and avoid the mirror because I already know what I look like.
When I open the bathroom door, Remedios is standing in the hallway with a glass of water and a wet cloth. She doesn’t ask if I’m okay. She just hands me both and walks me back to the guest room, one warm hand on my lower back.
“The flowers came again,” she says.
“I know. I heard the doorbell.”
“Same card?”
“Probably.” I don’t lift my eyes from the glass to say it.
She sits me down on the edge of the bed and goes to get them. I take small sips of water and wait for my stomach to decide if it’s going to accept this offering or revolt. Today it accepts. Small mercies.
Remedios returns with a bouquet of white roses and greenery, professionally arranged, probably expensive. The card tucked into the stems is the same cream stock, the same handwriting.
I’m sorry. I’m here when you’re ready. P
Nine days now, and nine identical bouquets with nine identical cards.
I should tell the florist to stop delivering, block his number, hire a divorce lawyer, and burn every trace of Pietro Marino from my life.
Instead, I open the nightstand drawer and add this card to the stack of eight others. They fan out in the drawer, a hand I don’t know how to play.
Remedios watches me do it. She doesn’t comment.
“You have a visitor,” she says instead.
My stomach drops. “If it’s Pietro-”
“It isn’t.” Remedios’s mouth thins. “It’s your mother. She’s in my sala, refusing the coffee I offered her, looking at my furniture like it might give her a disease.”
Beatrice Sposito has never once set foot in this house. In ten years she has referred to Remedios only as your husband’s aunt, in the tone she saves for bad weather. That she’s sitting in that sala at all means a wall has come down somewhere I can’t see.
She’s standing when I come in, hands folded, spine straight, wearing pearls to a house she despises. She looks me over, the guest-room hair, the swollen eyes, the borrowed robe, and I watch her decide not to remark on any of it. For my mother, that’s an act of enormous restraint.
“You look terrible,” she says. So much for restraint.
“I’ve had a hard week, Ma.”
“I’m aware. It’s on the news.” She sets her handbag on Remedios’s table with a precise click. “I didn’t come to lecture you.”
“You always come to lecture me.”
“Come home.” She lays the words down flat and certain, sure they’re the winning card.
“Not to that house. To the company. To the name you built there. Half of what that woman is parading around as hers came out of your head, and you’re letting her take it by walking away.
” Her chin lifts. “Don’t come back for love.
Love is what dragged us all into this. Come back because it’s yours, and you’re letting it be stolen out from under you. ”
“There it is.” I almost laugh, and the laugh comes out wrong, wet. “You drove across the city, into a house you can’t stand, to tell me to fight for a company. Not to ask how I am. Not to ask about-” I stop the word before it gets out. “Of course. The strategy, the optics, the Sposito name.”
A flinch crosses her face, quick and unfamiliar, gone before I can be sure I saw it. When she speaks again the steel has gone out of her voice.
“I’ve spent your whole life trying to manage it for you,” she says.
“The match, the marriage, whatever people would say. And I’m starting to think it made everything worse, not safer.
” She picks the handbag back up, and I watch the armor reassemble piece by piece.
“I don’t know how to stop doing it. But I know that I should. ”
It’s the nearest thing to an apology my mother has ever handed me, and it’s nowhere near enough, and we both know it standing there in Zia Remedios’s sala.
“I need you to go now, Ma.”
She goes. At the door she pauses, and for one breath I think she’ll turn and say the thing neither of us has ever known how to say. She doesn’t. The door shuts behind her with the soft, final click of a woman who has never slammed anything in her life.
Remedios comes back in once the car has pulled away. My hand has drifted to my stomach again, that gesture I can’t seem to stop making, and her eyes track the movement.
“Have you told him?” she asks, though the answer is written all over me.
“No.” The word comes out smaller than I mean it.
“Are you going to?”
I press my hand flat against the swell, as if I could keep the whole question tucked safe beneath it. “I don’t know,” I say, and it’s the most honest thing I’ve told anyone in weeks.
She nods, unsurprised. “My daughter went through the same thing, you know. Not the pregnancy, the leaving. She packed her bags three times before she finally stayed gone.”
I didn’t know Remedios had a daughter. In ten years, she’d never once mentioned her.
“What made her finally leave?” I ask.
“She realized she was staying for the wrong reasons. For the house. For the routine. For the fear of what people would say.” Remedios meets my eyes. “She wasn’t staying for love. And staying without love is just slow suffocation.”
The words land hard in my chest.
“I don’t know if Pietro loves me,” I say. “I thought I did. But now-”
“You know what I heard, back when we were setting up for the anniversary party?” Remedios interrupts. “I heard Giulietta Greyson talking to one of the servers. Laughing about how she’d proposed to Pietro three times over the years. Three times, and he turned her down every one.”
My breath catches.
“Zia Consuelo wanted that match desperately. Kept pushing for it until the day she died. But Pietro refused. He said-” Remedios pauses, as if deciding whether to continue. “He said he was waiting for the right person. And then, not a year after her funeral, he married you.”
I want to believe it, that Pietro chose me, that I wasn’t just a consolation prize or a strategic alliance or a way to fulfill his deathbed promise without actually marrying Giulietta.
But wanting to believe isn’t the same as believing.
“Remedios,” I say slowly, “that’s a kind story. But you weren’t there. You didn’t see how he looks at her. How he drops everything when she calls. How he-”
“I wasn’t there,” she agrees. “But I’ve been here.
I’ve watched you these past days. I’ve seen you check your phone a hundred times an hour.
I’ve seen you keep those cards in your drawer instead of throwing them away.
I’ve heard you almost dial his number at two in the morning and then stop yourself.
” She leans forward. “You love him. That’s not in question.
The question is whether he loves you back.
And you won’t find the answer hiding in my guest room. ”
My phone buzzes.
A text from Pietro.
I’m coming to Remedios’s place. I need to see you. Please don’t run.
My heart slams against my ribs.
“He’s coming,” I say.
Remedios stands, smoothing her skirt. “Then I’ll make coffee.”
“Remedios, I can’t-”
“You can.” She pauses at the door. “You’ve been running toward Pietro Marino since the day you met him. Maybe it’s time to stand still and see what he does when he has to be the one running.”
She leaves.
I look down at my phone, at those three lines. I’m coming to Remedios’s place. I need to see you. Please don’t run.
I could run. I’ve spent my whole marriage running, toward him, away from him, in circles around him, always the one moving while he stood still and let me.
Not today. I put the phone face-down and I don’t answer it.
I don’t pack a bag, and I don’t sit by the window arranging myself to receive him the way I’ve received every scrap of his attention for ten years.
If Pietro Marino wants to find me, he can do the running for once.
He can learn exactly how it feels to chase a woman who has finally stopped waving.
My hand settles over my stomach. Let him come. Let him find out how far he has to walk.