Chapter 31
We don’t talk about it after. We shower off the dirt and the soot from the fire and then collapse into bed without discussion, letting exhaustion take over.
I wake up the next day with Nico completely wrapped around me, our bodies intertwined as though physical touch is a relief.
We stay like that for a while, silent but both awake, holding each other.
Eventually his body slips back into mine, and we let that comfort take over, no more words needed, just the feel of each other.
We spend the rest of the morning clearing ash away from the trees that have burned.
The damage is, remarkably, not too bad once we start hauling away fallen branches—four trees have major damage, but Nico is confident this will all eventually be a forgotten blip for the grove.
We pass the time talking about the trees—how ash is used sometimes as fertilizer, but too much of it shifts the pH of the soil; how older olive trees like these are more likely to regenerate because they have deeper roots.
He talks and I listen, because I don’t have the words yet to explain all the thoughts roiling inside me.
I want to say how much I feel like these trees.
How I’ve grown here, but my pH needs the city and my restaurant and busyness to survive.
How I got burned and he helped me regenerate, but my old roots are so firmly planted in New York that I have to keep growing there.
And I know he hasn’t asked me to stay. I know he wouldn’t ask me to, because we’re so similar—we both are lucky to get to do what we love in the places that we love. No person could override that.
But among all that love, I know I owe him some words of my own. I have to tell him I feel the same way he does before I leave. He deserves to know how lovable he is, even if there’s no happy ending waiting for us.
But that will have to come later. I go home and shower and change so I can show up to work at noon like I always do. I only have a few more days here, and I’m not going to let Gia down after everything she’s done for me.
She’s already there when I arrive.
“Did you two get the ash off the trees this morning?” she says without looking up, her hands already deep in pasta dough.
Well, that’s not what I expected.
Gia’s property abuts Nico’s, but her house is much too far from his for her to ever see anything.
There are acres and acres of farmland, cows, and groves between where she actually lives and where Nico’s house is.
That’s why I’ve never worried about her seeing me as I come and go from his place—they’re neighbors, but practically an entire forest separates them.
Although I guess I shouldn’t ever be surprised that Gia knows everything. And I’m never going to bullshit her.
“Yup,” I answer succinctly, walking over to the sink and washing my hands.
But she’s not dropping the topic. “Thank you for keeping the cows safe.”
“I didn’t do anything for the cows,” I answer truthfully, starting to dice onions and now not looking at her as much as she’s not looking at me. “Nico got them back behind the fence.”
“You know, his grandfather bought me the original Maremma cows I had,” she says casually.
I put my knife down with a clang, and that finally makes Gia look up. “Is this Share a Secret Day?” I ask pointedly.
She raises an eyebrow, the deep lines of her whole face rising with it. “I’m not the one pretending the person I’m dating is a secret.”
My mouth falls open. Damn. We’ve always played it straight with each other, but that was particularly straight.
“No one’s a ‘secret,’” I mumble, picking my knife back up and turning to my onions so I can go back to ignoring her.
“Listen, I’m mostly glad you’ve been able to keep him company, sleeping outside for me. I felt bad about that.”
“It needed to be done, Gia.”
“You didn’t have to,” she says, looking up. “Just because I’m too old to fight my own battles doesn’t mean you needed to join him.”
“I wanted to,” I say truthfully.
“For me, or for him?” She smirks, and I just roll my eyes. But she’s not done with me yet, apparently. “I bet he doesn’t even know I dated his grandfather for a while.”
This time, I’m so surprised I actually drop my knife. When I look up at Gia, her smirk has grown wider, loving getting me flustered. “Careful.”
“Get to the point, Gia,” I say with a sigh, trying to not let my curiosity show.
At the start of the summer, when she said she’d lost her first love young, I assumed she meant he’d passed away. But apparently I’m zero for two on that guessing game. I’ve really got to learn not to assume people have died.
She starts rolling out dough, not looking at me when she begins talking again.
“Marcello and I were always a terrible match, but we lived next door to each other. We fought about everything. He was such a stubborn mule, nothing like Nico.” I can’t help the small smile that blooms at that defense of him.
“He wanted the kind of wife who stayed home and cooked; he had no energy for a woman who needed more freedom. It was a passionate, tumultuous relationship that took me a long time to get over.”
She’s still not looking at me. Her movements are always so automatic, I wonder if she ever closes her eyes and keeps working.
Her knobbled hands aren’t as precise as I imagine they once were, but she doesn’t miss a beat.
Not even with the kind of admission I would expect to cause emotion in anyone else.
But Gia’s never been anyone else. She’s as matter-of-fact today as I imagine she was then.
“We both married other people, and I avoided him for a long time,” she continues, clearly not expecting me to have a reaction yet.
“But one day, when I had my first baby—Anita’s mother—Marcello came to my door.
He brought me two cows. He’d named them Marcello and Gia and said someone else could be stubborn for us.
I threw him out the door, and I imagine he laughed all the way home.
But I kept the cows. And I really grew to love them.
Raising cows is so different to cooking.
It has less immediacy. Marcello and I kept avoiding each other after that, but he always left his gate open so my cows could graze on his grove. ”
“Why did you avoid each other?” I ask, annoyingly invested in this decades-old doomed love story after just two minutes. I’m not a romantic, but come on.
“I think when you can’t make your first love work, there’s never a real end,” she says with a shrug.
“It never stopped feeling sad to see him. No one else pushed me the way Marcello did, even my husband. He wasn’t the right man for me, but I always loved him a little bit.
I couldn’t just have pleasant chats about the weather or the harvest with him.
It was more respectful to what we’d had to not speak at all. ”
“That sounds pretty dramatic, for you,” I admit.
I get that sly smile from her again. “Probably,” she says. “We did talk a bit more toward the end. He wanted me to convince Lorena that Nico was too gentle for her. She was always so like me, and I think it scared him.”
“And that didn’t offend you?” I say, shocked.
“No, I kind of agreed with him.”
“But they got married anyway,” I point out.
She shrugs again. “They were in love. They weren’t as strong as Marcello and I were to see they weren’t compatible.”
Well, at least there’s the Gia I know, willing to call anything as she sees it, even if it throws someone else under the bus.
“So why are you telling me all of this?” I finally ask, knowing she’s never been one for small talk.
“Love is complicated,” she says, pulling out her ravioli stamp and starting to work on the pasta she’s rolled out.
I roll my eyes. “That’s your entire opinion?”
“You didn’t ask me for my opinion. I just wanted to tell you some facts.”
I put my hands on my hips. “I’d like your opinion, Gia.”
“Are you . . . asking for my opinion?” It’s a challenge, and she’s enjoying it.
“Sure,” I say, not quite ready to give in to her but begrudgingly knowing that I do want to hear what she has to say.
“Because you know, you never ask anyone for anything.”
I groan. I guess I walked right into that. “That’s not true,” I counter.
“It’s absolutely true, you bug-eyed American idiota.
” She stamps out more ravioli and adds filling to the center, casually insulting me without even looking me straight on.
“You think you have to make every decision alone. Anita and Emilia have had to practically drag things out of you. But you’re not alone, okay? You can ask me whatever you need to.”
Our eyes lock, and I can see she’s completely serious.
It’s jarring, having that kind of permission.
With Gia I know it’s earned. It’s like my pasta she’s now letting get sold every evening (it wasn’t just that one night, thank goodness).
It’s so much sweeter knowing I’ve earned it.
I’ve earned my way into her heart, and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that an accomplishment was so hard won.
And it makes me want to be honest in a way I’ve never been able to be with anyone else.
“I’m in love with Nico, but I can’t stay here,” I say quietly.
“That’s obvious to anyone with eyes. You’d think your giant ones could see that.”
I smile. I’m so glad we’re going with insults for this heart-to-heart. I don’t think I could handle Gia going all sappy on me.
“So you said you wanted me to ask for something,” I say. “I’m asking. What do I do?”
“You make the hard choice,” she says, this shrug a little wearier than the ones before. “You can’t give yourself up for a man. It’s not an option for you. It wasn’t ever for me.”
“That’s helpful,” I murmur.
“It’s not. Not really,” she says, pinching the ravioli closed. “But it’s helpful sometimes to say it out loud. It saves you from having to buy people cows.”
I laugh and walk over and kiss her on the head. She’s so small I have to lean over to do it.
“Get back to work, okay?” she says, pushing me away and rolling her eyes. “We’ve got dinner in a few hours.”
And without another word, we both focus on what we do best.