19. Danielle
— ? —
Danielle
The ferry crossing takes three hours. I spend most of it on deck, watching the mainland shrink behind us and Sicily grow larger ahead, a dark shape rising out of the gray November sea.
The wind is cold and sharp with salt, and I pull my coat tighter and think about all the ways this could go wrong.
One week. My own room. Those were my conditions, and Niccolo agreed without hesitation.
But conditions are easy to set from a distance. It’s the keeping of them, the living inside them, that gets complicated. I’ve spent seven months rebuilding myself, learning who I am without him, and now I’m voluntarily walking back into proximity like I’ve forgotten everything I learned.
“You’re going to freeze out here.”
Niccolo appears beside me at the railing, holding two paper cups of something steaming. He hands me one - hot chocolate, I discover when I take a sip, the real kind made with actual chocolate, not the powdered stuff.
“Thanks.”
“The captain says we’re about forty minutes out. The house is another hour from the port, but Leon arranged for a car.”
“Your friend with the property.”
“Don Leon Rosciano, yes. We grew up in similar circles, though his family is based in Sicily rather than Tuscany. He offered the house when he heard I was looking for somewhere quiet.” Niccolo leans against the railing beside me, leaving a careful distance between us.
“He won’t be there. He’s in Rome this month.
It’s just the house and the caretaker who comes twice a week. ”
“And us.”
“And us.”
We stand in silence for a while, watching the water churn behind the ferry.
I’m aware of him beside me - the shape of his shoulders in his coat, the way his hands wrap around his cup, the profile I’ve memorized over years of looking at him across dinner tables and pillows and all the spaces between.
He looks different today. Less polished.
He’s wearing jeans and a sweater instead of the tailored clothes I’m used to, and his hair is ruffled from the wind.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
“That I don’t know what we’re doing here.”
“We’re taking a break. Getting away from everything.”
“I know what we said we’re doing. I don’t know what we’re actually doing.” I turn to look at him. “Seven months ago, I found you holding another woman in a house that was supposed to be ours. Now I’m on a boat to Sicily with you, and I agreed to it, and I don’t know what that means.”
“It doesn’t have to mean anything. It can just be a week.”
“Nothing is ever just a week with us.”
He’s quiet for a moment, considering. “You’re right. It’s not just a week. It’s a chance. A chance to be somewhere that doesn’t belong to my family or your family, somewhere without history or expectation. A chance to see if we can find our way back to each other without all the noise.”
“And if we can’t?”
“Then at least we’ll know.” His voice is steady. “I’d rather know than spend the rest of my life wondering.”
The ferry horn sounds, long and low, signaling our approach to the port.
“Come on,” Niccolo says. “Let’s get our bags.”
***
The house is smaller than I expected. From the photograph, I’d imagined something grand - aristocratic friends tend toward grand - but this is modest by any standard.
White walls, blue shutters, a terracotta roof that looks like it’s been patched more than once.
It sits on a hillside above the coast, surrounded by citrus groves that stretch down toward the water, the trees heavy with fruit that glows orange and yellow in the November light.
“It’s beautiful,” I say, standing in the doorway.
“It belonged to Leon’s grandmother. She refused to leave when the rest of the family moved to the main estate, so they kept it up for her.
After she died, he started using it as a retreat.
” Niccolo sets down our bags in the small entryway.
“Your room is upstairs, on the left. Mine is on the right. The bathroom is shared, but I can use the one downstairs if you’d prefer. ”
“It’s fine. We can share.”
“The kitchen is through there. Maria - the caretaker - stocked it yesterday. She said she’ll come by Thursday to check on things, but otherwise we’re on our own.”
I walk through the house slowly, taking it in.
The furniture is old but comfortable, the kind of pieces that get worn soft by decades of use.
There’s a fireplace in the main room with wood already stacked beside it.
The kitchen is small but well-equipped, with a view of the groves through the window above the sink.
It feels like a home. Not a showpiece, not a statement, just a place where people actually lived.
“What do you think?” Niccolo asks from the doorway.
“I think it’s perfect.” I turn to face him. “I didn’t expect perfect.”
“Neither did I, honestly. I’ve never been here before. Leon just said it was quiet and private, and I trusted him.”
“You trusted him?”
“He’s one of the few people I do trust. He doesn’t care about the Morelli name or Florence society or any of the things that matter to everyone else in my life. He just…” Niccolo shrugs. “He sees people clearly. No pretense.”
“Sounds like the opposite of your usual circle.”
“He is. That’s why I like him.”
I look around the kitchen again, at the copper pots hanging from hooks and the bowl of lemons on the counter and the view of the November sea in the distance.
This place has no Donna Matilde. No Charlotte.
No whispers or expectations or the weight of four hundred years of legacy pressing down on every moment.
For the first time in months, I feel like I can breathe.
“I’m going to unpack,” I say. “And then maybe take a walk. See those groves up close.”
“Would you like company? Or would you prefer to go alone?”
The question is careful, respectful. He’s not assuming. He’s asking.
“Company would be nice,” I hear myself say. “Give me twenty minutes.”
***
The groves are even more beautiful up close.
The citrus trees are heavy with fruit - lemons and oranges and something Niccolo tells me is bergamot, prized for its fragrance and used in perfumes and tea.
The November air is cool but not cold, and the light has that golden quality that only happens in late autumn, when the sun sits lower in the sky and everything looks touched with honey.
“My grandmother had a lemon tree in her garden,” I say as we walk between the rows. “Just one, but she treated it like a child. Talked to it. Sang to it. My mother thought she was crazy, but that tree produced more fruit than any other in the neighborhood.”
“Maybe it was listening.”
“Maybe.” I reach out and touch one of the lemons, feeling the bumpy skin under my fingers. “I didn’t know you knew anything about citrus.”
“I didn’t, until recently. Your mother taught me.” He stops beside a tree laden with oranges, looking up at them. “Did you know that the best oranges for juice are the ones with thin skin? They’re harder to peel by hand, but the flavor is more concentrated.”
“My mother taught you that?”
“She taught me a lot of things. Over the summer, when I was learning her recipes.” He reaches up and picks an orange, turning it over in his hands.
“I was terrible at it, at first. I kept picking the ones that looked prettiest instead of the ones that tasted best. She told me I had aristocrat eyes - too focused on appearance, not enough on substance.”
I laugh. “That sounds like her.”
“She wasn’t wrong.” He starts peeling the orange with his fingers, careful and methodical, the way someone does when they’ve practiced.
“I spent so much of my life caring about how things looked. The right clothes, the right events, the right wife from the right family. I never stopped to ask whether any of it actually made me happy.”
“Did it?”
“No.” He separates the orange into sections, holds one out to me. “The only time I was happy was with you. And I was too stupid to see that until I’d already lost you.”
I take the section and eat it. The juice is sweet and sharp, better than any orange I’ve had in years.
“You haven’t lost me,” I say quietly. “I’m standing right here.”
“Are you?” He offers me another section. “Sometimes I’m not sure. Sometimes I feel like you’re a thousand miles away, even when we’re in the same room.”
“I’ve been protecting myself.”
“I know. I earned that. I’m not complaining.” He finishes the orange and wipes his hands on his jeans, a gesture so unlike the polished aristocrat I married that it makes something loosen in my chest. “I’m just glad you’re here. Whatever that means, whatever you’re willing to give me - I’m glad.”
We keep walking through the groves, the silence between us easier than it’s been in months.
He points out different varieties of citrus, things Pia taught him, and I listen and ask questions and watch him transform into someone I barely recognize.
The man I married never would have walked through dirt in jeans.
Never would have picked fruit with his bare hands.
Never would have talked about his own failures with such unflinching honesty. This man is different.
“You’ve gone quiet,” he says.
“I’m trying to figure out who you are.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re not the person I left in April. And you’re not the person I married four years ago. You’re someone else entirely, and I don’t know if I trust it yet.”
“What would help you trust it?”
“I don’t know.” I stop walking, turning to face him. “Time, maybe. Consistency. Seeing whether this version of you survives going back to the real world.”
“This is the real world, Dani. This-” He gestures at the groves, the sea, the modest house on the hillside. “This is more real than anything in Florence. The estates and the galas and the family obligations - that’s the performance. This is what’s underneath.”
“And underneath is a man who picks oranges and wears jeans and quotes his estranged wife’s mother?”
“Underneath is a man who’s trying to remember who he was before anyone told him who he had to be.
” He holds my gaze. “You met that man once, you know. In a restaurant in Florence, when I was sending back perfectly good risotto just to have an excuse to talk to you. Before my mother got involved. Before the title started mattering more than the person wearing it.”
“I remember him.”
“Is he still someone you could love? If you let yourself?”
The question hangs in the air between us, big and terrifying and impossible to answer.
“I never stopped loving him,” I say finally. “That was never the problem.”
Something shifts in his expression - hope, maybe, or relief, or both.
“Then what was the problem?”
“I stopped trusting him. And love without trust is just… waiting to get hurt.”
He nods slowly. “Then I’ll keep earning trust. For as long as it takes.”
The sun is starting to set over the water, painting everything gold and pink. I watch the light catch the fruit on the trees, turning the oranges and lemons into something luminous, and I feel the guard I’ve been holding up for months shift slightly.
Not fall. Not yet. But shift.