68
GAbrIELA DUARTE
Before dinner, we found time for coffee.
Luca was waiting at a small café in Como. He’d said he’d be there at four. When I arrived ten minutes early, his cup was already empty.
“You’re too early,” I observed.
“I need to recalibrate.”
We sat outside on the sidewalk. I told him about an argument with a supplier, and Luca made me laugh with his impression of Bianchi. For almost an hour, we didn’t talk about us.
Later, as we walked, I told him my plans for the firm.
I would keep the main office in Paraty. I wanted to propose a restoration training center in Lisbon to the new foundation, starting with small workshops before taking on anything larger.
I still needed to find partners and work out the numbers.
Luca asked who could teach with me. Only when we passed the third closed shop did we realize we were walking away from the restaurant.
We turned the corner, laughing. I told him Heitor had new birthday plans.
“What is it this time?”
“He’s given up asking for a plane now. He’ll wait until he’s eighteen.”
“Denied.”
“He says he’ll ask his great-grandmother.”
“She’ll buy it. We need to speak to her first.”
I laughed.
The following week, we had our first couples therapy session. Luca came in with his phone in his hand and had to go back to reception to silence it. He kept looking at it until the therapist asked whether he was expecting an urgent call.
He said no. I wanted to talk about the night he’d rejected me but could only begin with the present: how I still braced for an accusation whenever his voice grew cold. Luca looked at me, then at his hands.
“When he goes cold, I still feel I need to start gathering documents,” I confessed.
“When she says she needs space, I still hear ‘I’m going to disappear,’” Luca replied.
We couldn’t talk about everything that morning. On the way out, Luca asked whether I wanted coffee. I chose to walk for a while.
“Normally, I’d buy something,” he admitted in front of a shop window.
“I’d schedule three more site visits.”
“Your solution sounds more exhausting.”
After we returned to Brazil, we continued the sessions by video. Sometimes we ended the call and stayed quiet. Other times, the conversation continued until someone called us to dinner.
Back in Paraty one evening, as we planned a trip I was making to Lisbon, Luca asked for the third time who would be traveling with me. I snapped the laptop shut.
“I’ve already answered, Luca. What do you really want to know?”
He pushed back his chair.
“Whether Cris is staying in the same house.”
I picked up my bag. Luca opened his mouth but didn’t try to stop me. I paused by the door.
“I’m not defending myself against this again.”
He rubbed his hands over his face. It took him a while to answer.
“You don’t have to. I’m jealous.”
“Then say so. Don’t disguise it as questions about schedules.”
I didn’t leave, but I couldn’t go back to planning either. We put the computer away. I went to sleep at the guesthouse, still angry.
The next day, he came to me without repeating the question. We talked before opening the calendar. I’d chosen a date without checking his commitments with the children; we changed the flight. As for Cris, my friend would stay wherever he wanted. Luca didn’t like hearing it, but he stopped arguing.
A few days later, I took Luca to the market one morning while my mother stayed with the children. He felt a mango so cautiously that the vendor snatched it from his hand.
“That one’s for today. Tomorrow you want a different one.”
“I’ll need a label,” he replied.
The woman looked at me, wordlessly asking whether he was serious. I started laughing. Luca bought four mangoes and spent the walk home trying to remember which one to eat first.
When it began to rain, we stopped under a bakery awning. We shared a loaf, still warm, tearing the soft center with our fingers. There was flour on Luca’s cuff; I brushed it off with my thumb, and he caught my hand before I could pull it away.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing. I was thinking how much I like going out with you.”
“Even when a mango humiliates you?”
“Especially then. No one in Como explains things to me in that tone.”
I kissed him there, between the bakery door and a bicycle leaning against the wall. When the rain eased, we walked home hand in hand. He’d left the fruit on the counter. We had to go back.
Those weeks brought answers the lawyers had been seeking since his previous trip to Italy.
The forensic examination found the images sent to the news site on Lorenzo’s devices.
A hospital employee admitted supplying copies of the medical record to an intermediary he’d paid.
The access logs matched the dates the files were sent.
The album photographs had come from someone else.
The morning after bringing it home, Luca had let in a contractor sent by the property manager to adjust the veranda door.
While he spoke on the phone in the bedroom, he’d left the man working near the table.
The work order confirmed the visit; recovered messages showed the same intermediary had paid him to photograph whatever he found.
In one of those images, the album lay open.
I read the report twice. So did Cris. Lending the album had been my choice, yet I caught myself wishing I’d kept everything somewhere no one could touch it. I took the album from the living room cabinet and put it in my bedroom drawer.
The man lost access to the property. The management company changed the lock and began arranging visits directly with Luca. None of it erased the memory of the first time I saw the photograph in the article. For a while, I still locked the drawer.
The answer about the old tests took longer.
The recent payments connected Lorenzo to Marinelli but didn’t establish who had started the fraud.
When the doctor gave his statement, he handed over documents he’d kept outside the clinic’s files.
Among them was a letter from Lorenzo, dated almost twenty years earlier, demanding that he make sure Luca didn’t seek another opinion.
The doctor admitted replacing the results and presenting the biopsy as a certainty it didn’t offer. He said Lorenzo had approached him after Luca’s engagement ended, knowing his brother would return to the clinic. He wanted Luca to give up on having children.
Luca showed me the copy of the letter one night after the children were asleep.
Lorenzo had written about the family agreement and the transfer of control to the next generation.
I already knew his interest in heirs; seeing it on paper, so many years before my children existed, made me put the page down.
“He was barely past twenty,” Luca said. “Already doing those calculations.”
“Is that enough?” I asked.
“They’re checking the letter. There’s a payment note with it. The receipt turned up in the accounts of the doctor’s former company.”
I looked at the date again.
Marinelli had also confirmed the payments from five years earlier, which Beatrice had helped arrange. There would still be forensic examinations, further statements, and legal proceedings. I asked for my lawyer to receive copies.
Luca gathered the papers.
“I could have listened to another doctor.”
I didn’t answer at once. I heard the refrigerator from the living room and a car passing outside.
“And you could have listened to me,” I said.
“I could have.”
He left the folder closed on the table. I rested my hand on his. That night, neither of us wanted to talk anymore.
Another morning, Luca shut the car door with the key and his phone on the seat. We were all outside. We waited for the locksmith on the sidewalk while Noah tried to work out how someone could fix it without breaking the window.
“You forgot both things?” he asked.
“I did a thorough job,” Luca answered.
Our son nodded gravely and ran to show me the locksmith’s case.
Four months after our first dinner, on another visit to Como, Luca took me to a trattoria he’d known when he was young. The owner hugged him, inspected his hair, and told him he was getting old.
“Have you all agreed to insult me?” Luca asked after the man walked away.
“Maybe he missed you.”
He stole an olive from my plate. I moved the dish away, and Luca raised his hands, laughing. It wasn’t the brief smile he wore in meetings. There was something boyish in that face I was still learning to know.
The owner came back to ask who I was. Luca looked at me before answering.
“My girlfriend.”
Heat rose in my cheeks. After everything, the word felt strange and deliciously simple.
Under the table, I rested my knee against his.
We spent dinner arguing about a film I’d loved and Luca had found too long.
On the way out, he repeated one of the lead character’s lines to prove he’d paid attention.
I corrected a word. He pulled me close by the waist and said the line again, this time against my mouth. I didn’t correct him.
We kissed in cars, laughed on the phone, and spent some nights together. I knew now that he stole the whole sheet in his sleep; he’d learned to give half back before I had to wake him properly.
That night, we walked in the garden. The children were asleep, with my mother in the adjoining rooms. Cris was in Portugal, helping me check the center’s setup costs between his old commitments.
Sofia was watching an opera loud enough to wake our ancestors.
Luca showed me the blue fragment I’d given him when I was seventeen.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it up close.”
“I kept it with the copy of the drawing.”
“And the team photograph?”
“That too. You were covered in dust that day.”
“We all were.”
He laughed and turned the fragment between his fingers.
“I also brought the letters I wrote after we found each other again.”
“Besides the one you brought to the guesthouse?”
“More than I managed to give you.”
“Why?”
“I’d start by apologizing and end up trying to explain. Then I’d read it and not want to give you another excuse.”
“You still have them?”
“Yes. I still don’t know what to do with them.”
“Keep them for now. Maybe one day I’ll want to read how the disaster evolved.”
He smiled.
“Before I saw you again, I even started a letter. I tore it up. Even in that, I couldn’t ask how you were.”
“So you chose to suffer from a distance.”
“I chose guilt I could control over the risk of asking for forgiveness and hearing no.”
“Coward.”
“Completely.”
I settled the fragment in his palm and closed his fingers around it.
“What was it you never really forgot?”
Luca answered without thinking.
“Your voice asking me to listen. I spent years hearing those words. But I also remembered you laughing in the kitchen, asleep over the plans. I tried to separate the two. I couldn’t.”
I touched his face.
“And now?”
“I want to hear you without comparing everything to a memory.”
“I’m more difficult now.”
“One of the improvements.”
The next morning brought confirmation that the preservation foundation had purchased the old Lisbon office. The proposal had taken months: courses with a local association, a setup budget, and funds reserved to sustain the first classes. I’d visited other spaces before recommending that one.
Luca had withdrawn from the negotiations and the vote on the purchase: the company selling it was his.
An independent appraisal and the prices of other properties were included in the process.
I’d defined the center’s requirements, but I hadn’t voted on the location either.
When the other board members approved the proposal, I made a point of reading the document to the end.
The coordinator in Lisbon called me after the signing. She would keep the key until I arrived; my lawyer received copies of the documents.
I opened my calendar to confirm the day I would go with the team.
I wouldn’t own the place again. Even so, I wanted to open the door and work there once more.
The furniture and documents in storage would first be inventoried by my firm. I would choose what to lend the center and what to keep.
I closed the computer when Camila came for help with a bow. I spent the rest of the morning in the garden with the children. Every so often, I remembered the call and had to smile to myself.
Days later, Luca fell asleep in an armchair after reading all three a story.
I went to wake him. A book lay open on his lap, and one of Heitor’s socks was caught beneath his shoe.
He picked it up, baffled as to how it had gotten there.
I started laughing. Once the children were asleep, we went out onto the terrace.
I stood near him for a while before I could speak.
“I forgive you.”
He went still.
“Gabi…”
“It’ll still hurt sometimes. I know. But that’s what I feel now.”
Luca began to cry silently.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You can just listen.”
He kissed my hair.