8. Pietro
— ? —
Pietro
The market is chaos.
Vendors calling prices. Customers haggling.
Crates of tomatoes and greens stacked in bright pyramids, the cold shine of the fishmonger’s ice, the smell of garlic and cured meat and espresso from the corner stand.
I push through the crowd with my eyes fixed on the back of her head, her dark hair pulled up in a messy bun, her shoulders hunched inside one of my old sweaters, too big for her.
Remedios told me she’d be here. “She goes every morning,” the older woman said, not quite meeting my eyes. “Says the noise helps her think.”
I understand that. Sometimes the only way to quiet the chaos inside is to drown it in chaos outside.
Ysabelle stops at a stall selling eggs. She picks one up, examines it, puts it back.
“Signora Ysabelle.” The vendor lifts a carton toward her; of course he knows her name, everyone in this market probably knows the sad young woman who’s been wandering their aisles for a week. “The brown ones came in an hour ago. Still warm.”
She shakes her head. “Just looking today. Keep them for somebody who’s actually cooking.”
I’m almost to her when she turns.
Her face goes white.
“No,” she says.
“Ysabelle-”
“I said no.” She’s already moving, already trying to slip past me into the crowd, but I step sideways and block her path. “Pietro, don’t do this.”
“I have to do this. You won’t answer my calls. You won’t read my messages. You kept the flowers but you won’t talk to me.”
“Remedios told you about the flowers?”
“She told me enough.” I reach for her arm and she flinches back. The rejection stings more than I expected. “Please. Just give me five minutes.”
“I gave you ten years.” Her voice is low, controlled, but I can see the tremor in her jaw. “I gave you everything I had. And you-”
She stops and swallows.
The vendor is watching us now. So is the woman at the next stall, and the man carrying a crate of cabbages, and the little boy eating a skewer of grilled meat. We’re becoming a spectacle.
I don’t care.
“I was wrong,” I say, loud enough for them to hear. “I was wrong, Ysabelle. I let a promise blind me and I stopped seeing my own wife. I stopped seeing you.”
Her face flushes red. “Pietro, stop it.”
“I told myself I was being honorable. I told myself I was doing what Zia Consuelo wanted. But I was just being a coward.” The words are coming faster now, tumbling out of me before I can sort them.
“I was scared to let Giulietta go because letting her go meant admitting Zia Consuelo was wrong. That she’d asked me for the wrong thing.
And I couldn’t, I couldn’t let her be wrong, because then her death would just be death.
Just an ending, with no purpose to it, no meaning. ”
The vendor is openly staring. A woman with a basket of mangoes has stopped mid-stride.
Ysabelle grabs my wrist and yanks me sideways, behind a stack of rice sacks where we’re at least partially hidden from view.
“Are you insane?” she hisses. “You can’t just - you can’t just show up and make a scene in a public market like-”
She stops mid-sentence.
Her face goes gray.
“Ysabelle?”
She bends double, one hand braced on the rice sacks, the other pressed to her mouth. Her shoulders heave. She’s going to be sick.
I move without thinking. My hand finds the back of her neck, steadies her, and then I’m gathering her hair away from her face and holding it in a loose knot while she retches into the gap between the sacks. There’s nothing in her stomach, I can tell by the sound, but her body keeps trying anyway.
“Okay,” I say, keeping my voice low and calm. “Okay. I’ve got you, just breathe.”
The vendor appears with a bottle of water. I take it, nod my thanks, wait for the spasms to pass. When they finally do, Ysabelle straightens slowly, and I press the water into her hands.
“Small sips,” I say. “Rinse and spit first.”
She does. Her hands are shaking. I guide her to sit on a crate, and she lets me, which tells me how bad she’s feeling. Ysabelle never lets anyone help her when she can avoid it.
I crouch in front of her and watch her take careful sips, watch the color slowly return to her cheeks.
And then I watch my brain catch up to what my body already knows.
The nausea, the gray skin, the hand she keeps pressing to her stomach, my old sweater, which she never used to wear.
“You’re-” I can’t finish the sentence.
She looks at me over the rim of the water bottle. Her eyes are red-rimmed, exhausted, defiant.
“Yes.”
The world tilts.
“How long?”
“I found out the day I left.”
The day she packed her bags and walked out. She already knew, and she didn’t tell me.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
The question comes out rougher than I intended. I see her flinch, see her walls go up, see the softness in her eyes harden into that polished-stone expression I’ve come to dread.
“Because I don’t trust you anymore.”
It cuts deeper than anything Giulietta ever said, deeper than Zia Consuelo’s deathbed request.
“Ysabelle-”
“I don’t trust you with this.” Her hand moves to her stomach, protective, unconscious. “I don’t trust you to put us first. I don’t trust you to choose us over her. Over that promise. Over whatever guilt you’re carrying around.”
“I’d never-”
“You already did.” She stands, and I have to step back to give her room.
“Every time you dropped everything to run to Giulietta. Every time you put her feelings above mine. Every time you made me feel like a placeholder in my own marriage.” She’s not yelling.
Her voice is low, controlled, almost gentle.
That makes it worse. “You taught me not to trust you, Pietro. And now you want me to believe that one speech in a fish market changes everything?”
“What do you want me to do?”
The question hangs between us.
She holds my gaze a moment too long. Her eyes are tired, so tired, and I want to gather her up and take her home and make everything right. But I can’t. I’m the one who made it wrong.
“I want you to earn it back,” she says finally. “I want you to show me, not tell me. I want you to prove that you can be the husband I need. The father this baby needs.”
“I will. I swear to you, I will.”
“You can try.” She picks up her bag from where she dropped it, adjusts the strap on her shoulder, and meets my eyes one last time. “But it won’t be easy.”
She walks away.
I let her go.
***
I don’t go back to the office. I drive to Giulietta’s building instead, the one the company pays for, and I sit in the car for a while looking up at her windows, because I know that once I do this there is no soft version of it left.
She opens the door already smiling, already reaching, and I step back before her hand lands on my arm. It’s a small thing, that half-step, and I watch her clock it. The smile doesn’t fall so much as recalculate.
“I came to end it,” I say. “All of it. The apartment, the job, the number you call at two in the morning when a light bulb goes out. You’re not my responsibility, Giulietta. You never should have been.”
“Your responsibility.” She says it like I’ve slapped her. “Is that what I am to you?”
“You were my aunt’s daughter and I kept a promise to a dying woman for ten years and I let it eat my marriage alive. That’s on me, not you. But it stops today.”
Her face goes through three things fast, disbelief, fury, and then the one that used to work, the wobble at the mouth, the eyes going wet. “Zia Consuelo would be ashamed of you,” she says. “Throwing me away for a woman who walked out on you.”
A month ago that sentence would have kept me in the room another hour.
I feel it reach for the old handle in my chest and find nothing to hold.
“My aunt asked me to take care of you,” I say.
“She didn’t ask me to hand you my life, and she’d never have asked me to lose Ysabelle to do it.
I’ve spent ten years pretending I couldn’t tell the difference. I can.”
“You’ll regret this.”
“Maybe.” I take out my phone, because I want it to exist somewhere she can’t argue with, and I type it while she watches.
I’m not your contact. I’m not your anything.
Don’t come near me or Ysabelle again. I hit send and I hear her phone chime on the table behind her, and something in her face finally understands that I mean it.
“Legal will handle the severance. Someone else will handle you from here. Not me. Not ever again.”
I set the apartment key on the little dish by her door, the one she keeps for exactly this, and I leave before she can find the next thing to say.
In the elevator my hands are shaking and my chest is doing something I don’t have a word for, and it takes me until the lobby to place it.
It isn’t guilt. For the first time in ten years, walking away from Giulietta Greyson, I feel like a man who chose.