22. Kylie
— ? —
Kylie
I woke to an empty bed.
The panic hit before I was fully conscious, three years of cold sheets compressed into one spike of adrenaline that had me sitting up, heart hammering, hands reaching for a body that wasn’t there.
He left. He’s gone. It was one night and he-
Then I heard it.
The stove clicking on. The creak of floorboards in the kitchen. And something else, a voice, low and off-key, singing something in Sicilian that sounded like it might have been a lullaby if the singer had any sense of pitch whatsoever.
Nico’s babble answered the singing. A clatter of spoon against high chair tray. Giovanni’s laugh, genuine, unguarded, the laugh I’d forgotten he had.
The empty side of the bed, healed by breakfast.
I got up. Found his shirt on the floor where he’d dropped it last night and pulled it on, not bothering with pants, and padded barefoot down the hall toward the kitchen.
He was at the stove with his back to me.
Shirtless. The tattoo visible on his ribs.
Nonna Peppina’s recipe card, permanent now, part of him forever.
His suit pants were slung low on his hips, feet bare against my worn kitchen tile.
Nico was in his high chair, covered in something orange, waving a spoon like a conductor while Giovanni sang.
My plate was already set.
My coffee was already made, the French press, the good beans, exactly the amount of cream I liked. A cloth napkin folded beside the fork, like we were in the brownstone instead of my cottage with the water-stained ceiling.
I leaned against the doorframe and let the relief hit me like weather.
This was what it could have been. What it should have been. Three years of mornings I’d spent alone, and here was the version that existed in a universe where he’d made different choices.
He turned, spatula in hand, and saw me.
His whole face changed.
“Good morning.” His voice was rough. Tender. The voice of a man who’d spent the night learning how to stay.
“Good morning.”
“Eggs in two minutes. Sit.”
I sat.
Nico reached for me immediately, orange-covered fingers grasping. I caught his hand, kissed his palm, got mashed sweet potato on my lips.
“He’s been up since six,” Giovanni said, sliding eggs onto my plate. “We’ve been discussing Sicilian folk music. He has opinions.”
“Strong ones?”
“Very.” Giovanni sat down across from me, his own plate loaded. “He believes the third verse of ‘Cu Ti Lu Dissi’ is structurally unnecessary.”
“He’s not wrong.”
Giovanni’s smile cracked wider.
We ate in comfortable silence, the kind that used to terrify me, back when I thought silence meant distance. Now it just felt like breathing.
My phone rang.
6:47 a.m. Miss Dot’s number.
“Miss Dot? Is everything-”
“Sugar.” Her voice was shaking. Miss Dot, who’d survived three husbands and seventy years of Southern life and never once lost her composure. “Sugar, you need to come to the theater.”
“What happened? Is it the storm? The damage-”
“Just come.” Her voice cracked. “Come now.”
The Marlowe stood.
That was the first thing I saw as we pulled up, the building still there, still whole, the boards I’d put up yesterday still in place over the historic windows. The facade was intact. The marquee was crooked but attached. The bones had held.
Then I saw the smoke damage.
“Electrical fire,” Miss Dot said. She was standing on the sidewalk in her bathrobe and house slippers, looking smaller than I’d ever seen her. “Started in the projection booth around four this morning. Could have been the whole building, sugar. The whole everything.”
I stared at the black marks streaking up from the second-floor windows.
“But it wasn’t,” I said.
“No.” Miss Dot’s voice was strange. “It wasn’t.”
I pushed through the front doors.
The lobby was wet. Soaked, actually, water pooling on the original terrazzo floors, dripping from the ornate plaster ceiling, streaming down the walls. But it was water, not char. Water meant the sprinklers had worked.
The sprinklers Giovanni had over-engineered into the budget.
The ones I’d argued against for six weeks because they cost too much, because we didn’t need that level of coverage, because I knew better than some New York money man about what my theater required.
“The fire suppression kicked in at 4:03 a.m.,” the fire chief said.
He was standing in the middle of my lobby, clipboard in hand, looking like he’d been dragged out of bed and was determined to be professional about it.
“Electrical short in the projection booth, spread to the curtains in the upper gallery before the system contained it. Without that sprinkler setup-” He shook his head.
“Ma’am, I’ve been doing this thirty years. That system saved your building.”
I turned.
Giovanni was standing in the doorway, Nico on his hip, watching me with a look I couldn’t place.
“You were right,” I said.
“I usually am.”
“Don’t be smug about it.”
“I’m not being smug.” He stepped closer. Lowered his voice. “I’m being grateful that my paranoia paid off for once.”
I wanted to kiss him.
I did kiss him, quick, fierce, in front of Miss Dot and the fire chief and whoever else was watching.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Always.”
***
The relief lasted one hour.
Then the calls started.
Not to me, to Declan, in Boston. Old names I’d never met, family connections I’d barely known existed, the entire Jordan network suddenly, violently interested in the architect down in Savannah who’d spent a year rebuilding a theater.
The architect whose married name was Ferraro.
“My cousin’s wife called this morning.” Maria, one of my crew leads, wouldn’t meet my eye as she said it. “She said - she said you were married to some kind of crime boss? That your father-”
“My father was Patrick Jordan,” I said. “And yes, I was married to Giovanni Ferraro. We’re divorced.”
Maria stared at me.
Around us, the emergency cleanup crew kept working, but slower now. Listening.
“The Ferraro family-” Maria started.
“Is complicated. Like every family.” I held her gaze. “You’ve known me a year, Maria. What have you learned about me in that time?”
“That you work harder than anyone I’ve ever met.” Her voice was quiet. “You paid fair wages when you didn’t have to. You treated everyone on this crew like they mattered.”
“And what do you know now that you didn’t know yesterday?”
She hesitated.
“I know your maiden name,” she said finally. “And I know your ex-husband’s family history. And-” She looked away. “I know my cousin’s wife reads too many conspiracy blogs.”
I touched her arm.
“I’m still the same person,” I said. “The past doesn’t change that.”
She nodded. But she still didn’t quite meet my eye.
The Savannah grapevine was slower than the Jordan network, but no less thorough.
By noon, I’d had three neighbors go quiet when I walked into the hardware store.
The woman at the coffee shop who’d been friendly for a year suddenly found reasons to look at her phone while she made my latte.
A crew guy’s wife came to pick him up for lunch and wouldn’t come past the threshold, wouldn’t meet my eye when I said hello.
It wasn’t hostility, exactly.
It was worse.
It was the particular caution of people who’d suddenly realized they didn’t know someone as well as they’d thought.
“They’ll come around,” Miss Dot said. We were standing in the lobby, watching the cleanup crew work. “Small towns love a scandal, but they love a redemption arc more. You just have to give them the story.”
“The story is complicated.”
“All the good ones are.” She patted my arm. “Tell it anyway.”
***
The emergency benefit-planning meeting started at 3 p.m.
Twenty people crammed into the Marlowe’s least-damaged room, volunteers, donors, the found family I’d built over a year of fourteen-hour days.
They were all looking at me with variations of the same expression: curiosity, concern, the particular wariness of people who’d learned something they weren’t sure how to process.
I stood up.
“I know some of you have heard things today,” I said. “About my family. About my ex-husband. About who I was before I came to Savannah.”
Silence.
“My father’s name was Patrick Jordan. He was killed six years ago, and for two years, my ex-husband knew who was responsible and didn’t tell me. He kept that information to protect his family’s reputation, and it cost us our marriage.”
I could feel Giovanni at the back of the room. Deliberately separate. Giving me space to own this.
“I was raised in a world most of you can’t imagine,” I continued. “A world where family meant something different, where loyalty was measured in blood, where women were expected to be ornamental and obedient and silent. I was trained for that life. I was good at it.”
Someone shifted in their seat.
“But I left. I built something new here - something that belongs to me, not to my family name or my married name or anyone else’s expectations. This theater. This community. This life.”
I looked around the room.
“You’ve known me a year. You’ve known the story a day. Decide which one you trust.”
Silence stretched.
Then Miss Dot raised her walking stick, the one with the reinforced base that she claimed was for hiking but everyone knew was basically a cudgel, and brought it down hard on the floorboards.
Once, twice, a third time.
The applause that followed was ragged at first. Then stronger.
By the time it died down, half the room was standing.
***
The hothead arrived at five.
I heard the commotion before I saw him, raised voices in the lobby, someone saying “Sir, you can’t just-” and then the unmistakable sound of a door being shoved open hard enough to hit the wall.
Brendan Kelly. Twenty-four years old. My father’s sister’s grandson, which made him some kind of cousin I’d never bothered to map precisely. I’d met him twice, both times at funerals, and remembered mainly that he had more passion than sense.
He was also armed.
I could see the bulge under his jacket as he strode toward me, face flushed with the particular fury of young men who’ve been raised on stories of honor and blood.