13. Ysabelle
— ? —
Ysabelle
I’ve been selling bread for weeks now, and I still haven’t told Pietro what I’ve named it.
It began the morning Pietro came to bake, when Signora Carmela from three houses down knocked before he did and bought a dozen of mine while his were still in the bag.
I hadn’t set out to sell a thing. But she reached for her coin purse, and I named a price and took the money, and it was mine in a way nothing had been in ten years.
The next week she brought her sister. The week after, her sister brought the woman who runs the corner store, who tore off a piece of crust right there in Remedios’s doorway, chewed it slowly, and looked at me the way people look at money.
“I want to stock these,” she said. “Two dozen to start, more if they move.” She was already digging for a pen. “What’s the bakery called?”
“It doesn’t have a name,” I told her.
But that night I lay awake and it did. Sposito Kitchen.
My name, not his. My grandmother’s ratios, my hands, my ledger, because I’ve started keeping one, a cheap notebook from the corner store where I write down every dollar, every order, every cost. The numbers are small.
They’re also, every last cent of them, mine.
I’d forgotten what that felt like: to build a thing no one can quietly delete me from.
Zia Remedios found the notebook a few days later.
She didn’t say anything sentimental; she isn’t built that way.
She just ran her thumb down my column of figures, nodded once, and said, “Your margins are too thin on the cornetti. Charge more. From everything you’ve told me, your Nonna undercharged her whole life and died proud and broke. ”
“I’m not trying to build an empire,” I said.
“Aren’t you?” She raised an eyebrow. “You built one already. You just let someone else hang their name over the door.” She tapped the notebook. “Don’t do it twice.”
I didn’t tell her that I’d already sketched the door in the margin of the ledger.
Sposito Kitchen, in Nonna Fe’s slanting hand, the way it looked over the shop she built in Brooklyn before the bank and the years took it.
A small thing. A dream I shelved so long ago I’d forgotten it was mine to want.
By the time the house wakes this morning, the first batch is already cooling on the rack, and there’s a line in my notebook with my own name at the top of it.
***
The morning light through Remedios’s kitchen window is the color of honey.
I’m standing at the counter, watching Pietro flip focaccia in a skillet. He’s learned to toast them now, buttered and golden, the way I like them. His sleeves are rolled to his elbows, and there’s flour on his forearm, and he’s humming under his breath.
He looks like a man I could love again.
“You’ve gone quiet,” he says without turning around.
“I’m supervising.”
He flips the last focaccia and turns at last, one eyebrow raised. “Supervising.”
“Someone has to make sure you don’t ruin the ratio again.”
He sets the skillet down and comes around the counter, close enough that I have to tip my chin to hold his eyes. “And how am I doing?”
I lean against the counter and watch the muscles in his back shift as he reaches for a plate, the careful attention in his hands, every task he does now mattering to him.
The kitchen has gone very warm, and the strip of bare back that shows when he stretches for the plate, where his shirt rides up, is a genuine problem I have no intention of naming out loud.
I press my knees together under the counter and take a very casual sip of my tea, and I don’t think about the fact that my body forgave him somewhere around the second week of ginger tea, long before the rest of me was ready to.
I stay where I am. Just barely.
“That you’ve gotten better at breakfast,” I say.
He turns, smiles, and sets the plate in front of me with a small bow.
“For my lady.”
“Your lady is hungry.”
“I noticed.” He says it to my mouth, not the plate.
I eat. The bread is perfect, crisp on the outside and soft within.
He sits across from me with his own plate, and we eat in comfortable silence, and I think about how this used to feel like a performance.
How I used to wonder if his attention was real or if he was counting the minutes until he could check his phone.
His phone is on the counter now, face down and silent.
“I’ve been thinking about the nursery,” I say.
He looks up. His eyes sharpen with interest. “Tell me.”
“Yellow walls.” The image forms as I speak, crystallizing from months of private dreaming. “Like the room I had as a child, in my grandmother’s house. Nonna Fe painted it herself, this warm golden yellow that made everything feel like summer.”
“Yellow,” he repeats, in the tone of a man memorizing it.
“And a rocking chair. Wooden, with carved armrests. Nonna had one by her window, and she’d rock me in it when I couldn’t sleep.
The creak of the wood was the safest sound in the world.
” I pause, surprised by my own vulnerability.
“I want our baby to have that. That feeling of being held in place that creaks with comfort.”
Pietro sets down his focaccia and reaches across the table, and his hand covers mine.
“I’ll find you that chair,” he says. “If I have to track down every woodworker in the state.”
“You don’t have to-”
“I want to.” His thumb traces circles on my wrist. “I want to give you the nursery you’re dreaming about. I want to paint those walls myself, if you’ll let me. I want to build the crib with my own hands, even if it takes me fifty tries.”
My throat tightens.
“Pietro.”
“I mean it. Every word.”
I look at him across the breakfast table, at the flour on his arm and the sincerity in his eyes, at the man who broke my heart and is trying, day by day, to mend it.
He’s beautiful like this, in the raw way effort is beautiful. The lines around his eyes from sleepless nights on my behalf. The calluses forming on his hands from unfamiliar work. The way his whole body leans toward me without his seeming to notice.
I want him.
The realization moves through me slowly. Not just physically, though that too. I want all of him, the man he’s becoming and the father he’ll be to our child.
“I think,” I say slowly, “I might be starting to trust you again.”
The words land, and his face buckles.
I watch his breath catch and his eyes go bright and wet, his hand tightening on mine, not painful, just desperate.
“Ysabelle-”
“Don’t say anything.” I stand and move around the table to him and cup his face in my hands the way he’s cupped mine so many times. “Just let me say it. Let me mean it. I’m starting to trust you again. Not all the way. Not yet. But the door is opening.”
He pulls me onto his lap and buries his face in my neck. I feel his shoulders shake.
“I won’t waste it,” he says, muffled against my skin. “I swear to God, I won’t waste it.”
I hold him.
The morning light pours through the window, golden and full of promise.
Then the knock comes at the door.
Remedios is out, running errands. I feel Pietro stiffen beneath me and pull back, his face suddenly guarded.
“Are you expecting someone?” I ask.
“No.”
But there’s a note in his voice I don’t like. A tension he’s trying to hide.
The knock comes again, louder and more insistent.
I slide off his lap. “I’ll get it.”
“Wait-”
But I’m already moving, already crossing to the door and pulling it open.
And Giulietta Greyson is standing on the other side.
She looks wrong. That’s my first thought. Her hair, always immaculately styled, hangs lank around her face. Her clothes are wrinkled, slept-in. Her eyes have a glassy quality, unfocused and desperate.
“There you are,” she says, her voice hoarse and unhinged, and her eyes go past me into the kitchen. “Both of you.”