12. Pietro
— ? —
Pietro
I never went through the door she left open.
I stood in the hall until the candle burned down, and then I went to the spare room, because walking through it uninvited would have undone every inch I’d gained.
At first light there’s a full glass of water on my nightstand that I didn’t put there.
I carry it down with me, because it feels wrong to leave it, and the front door is standing open, and she’s at the kitchen table with an envelope flat under one hand.
Cream stock, no stamp, her name across the front in a hand I know too well. Hand-delivered. Somebody stood on that step in the dark while we slept, and everything in me turns to ice.
She’s already read it. She reads it again while I watch, and I see the color go out of her face and every inch of ground I’ve won these past weeks slide out from under me in the space of three short lines.
She pushes it across the table to me. Giulietta’s handwriting. He will never really be yours. He made a promise at my mother’s deathbed, and Pietro Marino doesn’t break his promises. Enjoy the detour. I always collect what belongs to me in the end.
“Is it true?” Ysabelle’s voice is flat, that terrible level tone she uses when she’s holding herself together with both hands. “The promise. That you’ll never really let her go.”
I don’t lie to her. I’ve done enough of that by omission to last a lifetime.
“There was a promise,” I say. “Zia Consuelo raised me. She wasn’t blood, but she was the only mother I had.
On the last day of her life she took my hand and asked me to look after Giulietta.
To marry her, if I could. I said yes, because you say yes to a dying woman who fed you when your own mother wouldn’t.
” Ysabelle flinches, and I make myself keep going.
“And then I spent years keeping that promise every way I could find that didn’t mean handing Giulietta my life.
I gave her a job. I gave her my time. I gave her far too much of it, and it cost me you. But I never gave her this.”
“Remedios told me she proposed to you,” Ysabelle says quietly. “Three times.”
“And three times I said no.” I hold her eyes so she can see there’s no flinch in me. “Then I married you.”
“Then why does she still think she has a claim on you?”
“Because she isn’t well. Because I let it drag on far too long, and I only cut the last thread a few days ago, the day I told you I had.
” I take out my phone, find the thread, and hand it to her, and I let her read the last words I ever sent Giulietta Greyson, the ones I sent right after I ended it.
I’m not your contact. I’m not your anything.
Don’t come near me or Ysabelle again. “I should have sent that years ago,” I say. “I sent it too late. But I sent it.”
She’s quiet for a long time. I’ve finally learned not to fill her silences, so I stand in Remedios’s kitchen with my heart in my throat and let her decide what I am: a guilty man serving out a sentence, the way Giulietta wants her to see me, or a man telling his wife the whole truth for the first time in ten years.
“Burn it,” she says at last.
I hold the letter over the sink and light the corner, and we watch Giulietta’s three cruel lines curl to ash and go down the drain. When it’s gone I don’t reach for her. I’ve earned no right to. I wait.
“A woman who had already won,” Ysabelle says, watching the last of it disappear, “wouldn’t need to leave notes on a doorstep in the dark.” She lifts her eyes to mine. “She’s losing. Isn’t she?”
“She lost a long time ago,” I say. “I just never told her plainly enough for it to land.”
“Pack a bag,” I say. “The house has a gate and a guard, and Anton can put a man on the street by tonight. Or a hotel, if you can’t stand the house. Anywhere she doesn’t have the address.”
“No.”
“Ysabelle.” I keep my voice level and it costs me. “She stood on that step in the dark while you were asleep. She knows where you sleep.”
“And I know where I sleep. Here.” She hasn’t raised her voice either, which is worse.
“I’ve been moved my whole life, Pietro. Into a marriage.
Into your house. Into a corner of my own company.
This is the first door I’ve chosen in ten years, and I’m not walking out of it because that woman wants me to. ”
“This isn’t about what she wants-”
“It’s exactly about what she wants.” Her hand comes down flat on the table. “She wants me running. You want me safe. From where I’m sitting, those look the same.”
I want to tell her she’s wrong. The trouble is she isn’t, and neither am I. I stand in Remedios’s kitchen with the smell of burned paper still in the drain and understand that this is the first argument we’ve had in ten years where I’m not the only one in the wrong, and I don’t know how to have it.
“Then Anton’s men stay on the street,” I say finally. “Not in the house. On the street. That isn’t a request.”
She looks at me for a long moment. “Fine,” she says, and picks up the water glass I carried down, and drinks it herself.
***
In the days after, some knot in the house loosens. A few nights on, she lets me braid her hair.
It’s a disaster. I’ve watched six tutorials on my phone, practiced on a rope I bought from the hardware store, but real hair is different, slippery and uncooperative. Her strands keep escaping my fingers no matter how carefully I section them.
“You’re pulling,” she says.
“Sorry,” I mutter, and loosen my grip.
She tips her head to catch her reflection in the dark window. “And that’s not a braid, that’s a bird’s nest.”
“I’m trying.”
“Try softer,” she says, and there’s no edge in the words, and I take the correction and hold on to it.
I do. My fingers are too big for this work, too clumsy. But I keep going, weaving and unweaving, until I have what might charitably be called a lopsided plait.
She reaches back and touches it. Laughs.
The sound is so unexpected that I freeze. I haven’t heard her laugh in weeks, really laugh, not the polite sound she makes at company dinners but the genuine amusement that crinkles her eyes.
“You’re terrible at this,” she says.
“I know,” I say, and I don’t stop.
She settles back against my knees. “The worst braider in the country.”
“Probably.” I don’t stop working the strands to say it.
Her fingers find the lopsided plait again, and she leaves them there. “I love it,” she says, and I understand she isn’t talking about the braid.
She says it easily, casually, and my heart stops anyway.
***
The days fold into each other after that, small and domestic and nothing resembling the life we had before.
I rub the ache out of her back in the evenings until she falls asleep against my knees, and I sit there without moving, thinking about every night she needed me and I was answering Giulietta’s texts instead.
Never again. At two in the morning she wakes me craving lemon granita and salty olives, and I drive across the city to find it, because there’s nothing left she could ask me for that I wouldn’t go and get.
It’s the corner store that brings it up. I come in from the market with the olives she asked for and find her at the table with a cheap notebook and a pencil, doing sums with her lips moving.
“Signora Carmela wants eight dozen for the weekend,” she says, not looking up. “Remedios’s oven does two dozen at a time if I don’t mind them uneven. I mind them uneven.”
I know what I’m looking at. I’ve looked at it across boardroom tables for fifteen years, a good product and a bottleneck. “There’s a supplier in Queens,” I say. “Commercial deck oven, six trays, I can have it here by Thursday-”
“No.”
“It’s a pizza-shop oven, Ysabelle, not a yacht.”
“It’s yours.” She sets the pencil down. “The house was yours. The company was yours with my name sanded off it. If you buy the oven, then the first thing I’ve built since I was twenty-three is one more thing you paid for, and I can’t have that. Not this.”
“So you’ll turn down the order.”
“I’ll take four dozen and tell her the truth.” She goes back to the notebook. “Nonna Fe started with a clay oven and a borrowed sack of flour. I can start with Remedios’s.”
I stand there with the olives in my hand and nothing to fix, and it’s the strangest feeling of the whole month, being told no by my wife over eight dozen focaccia and finding I’m proud of her for it.
***
That night, she comes to my room.
I’m half-asleep when the door opens and her silhouette fills the doorway, and then she crosses to the bed and stands beside it, looking down at me.
“Ysabelle-”
“Don’t talk.”
She’s wearing a thin nightgown. I can see the curve of her belly underneath, the new fullness of her breasts. Pregnancy has changed her body in ways that make my mouth go dry.
“This doesn’t mean I forgive you,” she says.
“I didn’t think it did.”
“Don’t stop trying.”
“Never.” It comes out hoarse.
She reaches for the hem of her nightgown.
I stop thinking.
She’s on me before I can breathe. Her mouth on mine, hungry and angry and desperate. Her hands pulling at my shirt, my shorts, anything between us. I flip her onto her back and she gasps, then wraps her legs around my waist and pulls me closer.
“I hate you,” she says against my mouth.
I catch the word with my mouth. “I know.”
“I hate how much I want you.” The confession lands behind my ribs and stays.
My answer is my mouth, dragged down the line of her throat.
“Make me feel good anyway,” she breathes.
I do.
The last of it comes off her, the nightgown, my shorts, everything, until there’s nothing left between us.
Then I just look. She’s flat on her back in my bed, flushed all the way down her chest, nipples gone dark and tight, the firm curve of her belly, her thighs already slick for me. Mine. Still mine, whatever she says.
“Don’t just look at me,” she says.
“No.”
My mouth goes to her throat, then works down.
My tongue drags between her breasts, and I pull one nipple between my lips and suck until she curses at the ceiling, then the other.
I keep going, down over her ribs, over the swell of our child, to the crease of her hip, and she fists a hand in my hair and drags me exactly where she wants me.
“There.” Her voice is already ragged. “God, right there, don’t you dare stop.”
I don’t. I lick into her slow and then not slow at all, sealing my mouth over her clit while I work two fingers into her.
She’s drenched, running down my wrist, grinding up into my face with every scrap of composure gone, and I could come just from this, just from the filthy sounds she’s making and the way her thighs clamp around my head.
“Pietro.” She’s shaking. “I’m going to-”
“Do it,” I tell her against her cunt. “Come on my mouth. Let me feel it.”
She does, clenching around my fingers, a raw cry tearing out of her that she doesn’t bother to swallow. I don’t stop until she’s shoving my head away, too sensitive, gasping.
Then I climb up her body and she’s already got a hand around my cock, guiding me to where she wants it.
“Careful,” I manage. “The baby-”
“On my side, then. Now.”
I fit against her back, one arm under her head, and push into her slow, because she’s tight and swollen around me and the sound she makes when I’m all the way in is obscene. I hold there a second, buried to the root, just to feel her clenched around me.
“Move,” she demands.
So I move, one hand spread over the curve of her belly, the other between her thighs working her clit in tight circles while I fuck her from behind, deep and careful, her spine arched into my chest. She reaches back and sinks her nails into my thigh, hauling me deeper, taking exactly what she wants.
“Harder,” she pants. “I won’t break.”
I give it to her harder. The headboard starts tapping the wall. She’s making the wrecked little sounds I’ve gone months without, muffled into the pillow, and I drop my mouth to the back of her neck and finally say the thing I’ve been holding since she opened my door.
“I love you.” I say it buried to the hilt in her, wrecked. “I love you, I love you-”
She doesn’t say it back.
But she comes again around me, clamps down so hard she drags me over with her, and I spill into her with my face in her hair her name the only word left in me.
After, I hold her.
She lets me.
We lie tangled together, sweaty and breathless. Her hand rests on my chest, and mine on her stomach, over our child.
“That was-” she starts.
“Yeah,” I manage, when it’s clear neither of us has the word for it.
She traces a slow circle on my chest, over the heart she has every right to distrust. “I still don’t forgive you.” She says it to my collarbone, not my face.
“I know.”
Her hand goes still. “But I don’t hate you either,” she says, and in the ruin of everything we’ve been, it’s the closest thing to hope I’ve had in months.
I kiss her forehead, then her nose, then her mouth.
“That’s enough,” I say. “For now.”
She falls asleep in my arms.
***
In the morning, she’s softer.
She makes tea for both of us and sits closer than she needs to at breakfast, and when she passes me in the hallway she touches my arm, a gesture so casual and intimate that it takes my breath away.
My phone buzzes.
A text from Anton, my head of security. The man I left monitoring Giulietta’s movements, because I don’t trust her stability.
Sir, I need to call you. It’s urgent. My man saw Giulietta Greyson parked down the street from the house twice this week. She’s watching the place. She’s asking the neighbors questions. She isn’t well, and I don’t think she’s going to stay away.
I look at Ysabelle, laughing at a joke Remedios made.
Then back down at the text.
I put my phone in my pocket and don’t mention it.
Not yet.