Chapter 30 Alessia
ALESSIA
Matteo is dying. No matter what I do, that reality plays in my mind.
I’m angry with him, so I haven’t gone to him or even called him.
How dare he not tell me? In what world does it make sense that I find out about how ill he is from Davide Fontana?
I know, I know, I shouldn’t be petty, but I’ve been dealing with way too many people letting me down, and I have earned the right to be as small as I wish.
It’s been two days since I came back from Florence, and I have ignored calls, voice, and text messages from both Alba and Nico. I deleted them even before I listened to or read them.
I am angry, and I’m holding on to it.
The result is that I can’t sleep.
So, at ten at night, after a day that started at six in the morning, I find myself in the cellar, which smells different once the wine is down.
Damp stone and oak mingle with the faint tang of spent yeast.
Gone are the green urgency of new fermentations and the frantic hiss of carbon dioxide rushing free—what remains is sugars spent and yeast settling like ghostly dust on barrel heads.
The room exhales.
The tanks, heavy with liquid, rest.
Barricato—when the wine rests in barriques and over time, the French oak allows it to breathe slowly, deepening the flavors with whispers of toast, vanilla, spice, and smoke, while the tannins soften and the wine gathers quiet strength and structure.
This is the phase no one romanticizes.
There are no bright photographs or clinking glasses—only the hush of taut discipline, of vigilance, the steel-trap restraint of knowing nothing can be rushed.
I like it here.
But then, I love winemaking as a whole. You have to love it to endure the heartbreak it can bring—bad weather, disease, a rogue fermentation, a cracked barrel—so that all the care and work you’ve poured in can be undone in a single season.
My boots give a hollow echo against the flagstones.
The barrels stand in regimented rows, sentinels of French oak: tight-grained and as my father said, expensive. Each bears a chalk inscription—parcel, clone, date—etched in dusty white strokes.
Inside, the wine is still finding its boundaries, restless and alive. Too much meddling now would bruise it; too little would let it wander. I know in my bones how to strike the right balance.
Unlike with my marriage, apparently.
I’m avoiding my bed because it makes me sad to be there alone. I miss Nico there the most. So, rest has become impossible.
I replay Nico’s face when I told him I didn’t trust him and see his wounded disbelief in technicolor.
I press my palms against a barrel’s cool oak head and feel the pulse of liquid beneath my skin.
While I labored among vines to make this—stained fingers, aching back, heart bare—men I love were speaking my name in rooms I wasn’t in. Their presumption that silence was kinder has left wounds that will scar.
At least my father never pretended to see me as an equal. Papà’s cruelty is honest. Nico’s, by contrast, was coated with concern, which makes it worse.
I move down the barrel aisle until I stand before Altèra— my premier wine, which Papà decried as indulgent, and the one Nico let go undefended.
I remember signing off on these barrels—€1,200 apiece—without a flicker of doubt. Not for the price, but because the wine demanded the finest vessel. Because the echoes of shortcuts here would resonate for decades. I don’t regret that. I regret trusting people who wouldn’t trust me in return.
I sit down in the tasting area in the cellar and pick up a bottle of Altèra—one I shouldn’t.
But the hell with it. I give and give and give…it’s time for me to take something.
So, I open a prized vintage. 1998.
At midnight, after I have drunk about half a bottle of the two thousand-euro-a-bottle retail wine, I decide I will not confront Nico and beg for his faith or insist he be braver than he is.
I have spent my life tending to vines, younger sisters, and sprawling estates, believing that care breeds loyalty.
That was my error. Barriques do not love you back. People do not either.
I take a long swallow of the wine I have now stopped tasting as I make more decisions one mustn’t when they have my blood alcohol level.
I will do what I do best.
I will work. I will guard my wine with every ounce of conviction. I will build something so undeniable that even Papà cannot wave it off as sentiment.
If Nico wants a strategy, I will give him one and beat it into his skull with a mallet. And if he presumes I will quietly allow myself to be managed by my husband or my father or the family trust board—then he has profoundly misunderstood me.
I walk up to my prized barrels of wine.
I pick up a piece of chalk and scratch a fresh line of chalk across the oak below the words: ALTèRA — LOT 3. NO INTERVENTION.
I write not in the best example of calligraphy: TRUST THE PROCESS
I step back and let the words settle into the grain.
Yes.
That will do.
The next morning, after I’ve gotten maybe four hours of sleep and I’m slightly hungover, which doesn’t happen often considering my profession, Alba finds me in my office in the cellar contemplating if I should just say the hell with it and take a nap or keep at it.
“Lucia said I’d find you here,” Alba announces. She’s in a skirt suit and heels that make my feet hurt even though she’s the one wearing them.
I straighten, spine lengthening like a drawn cord.
“I told Lucia to tell anyone who came looking for me that I was unavailable.”
Alba lifts a slender hand, voice already soft as dusk. “I’m sorry.”
I lean forward, my elbows resting on my weathered desk. “You knew,” I accuse her, “and you didn’t tell me right away? What? You’re suddenly loyal to Nico?”
Alba sighs, her shoulders slump. “He…he said he loves you and—”
“Basta!” I shout, standing up. “My marriage is none of your Goddamn business. Got it? You and I have a relationship that you walked all over.”
She curls her lips into a sad nod. “I fucked up, Alessia.”
A beat of silence stretches between us, filled only by the hum of distant cicadas and the low groan of barrel hoops settling with the heat.
“But I can’t lose you,” she pleads, voice unsteady now. “Please forgive me.”
A part of me wants to roll my eyes and say like hell she’ll lose me, but the other, the petty one wants her to suffer some. The petty bitch inside me doesn’t last when her eyes fill with tears.
“That’s not fair,” I clip.
“What?” She brushes off her tears.
“You can’t cry. That’s not okay. You know I…. So, no, Alba. You have to know you were wrong and be wrong and not cry.”
She hiccups softly and a laugh tears out of her. “I’m so sorry.”
“Oh!”
I go to her and open my arms. She walks in them. I hug her close.
I can’t stay angry with her. I mean if this was Toni, I’d have melted as soon as she looked at me. At least with Alba, because she’s older, I have some defenses.
“You can’t not tell me things again,” I chide as I pull away and hold her gaze.
“He…he really….” She takes a deep breath. “You have to hear this, Alessia. I asked him why he hasn’t told you, and he said…. God! He said it's because he doesn’t think he deserves you.”
I narrow my eyes and give her a withering look. “When we got engaged he told me he’d fuck around.”
“But he didn’t,” she points out, sniffling.
“And then he didn’t tell me that Matteo is sick and that asshole Fontana is his choice?”
“I don’t think Davide Fontana is getting anywhere close to the House of Alighieri,” Alba says confidently. She kisses my cheek. “Nico fucked up, too. But he didn’t want to hurt you.”
I laugh once, sharp and humorless. “Kindness by omission. Our family specialty.”
Alba winces. “Yes! And I know better, but in my defense, I only knew for a day.”
My throat tightens. I don’t answer, but I step away from her and pace in my office. “He’s such a…Dio!
“He loves you,” she insists, her eyes unwavering. “That man is undone by you. He watches you like you’re the axis of his world.”
“Matteo is dying, and he didn’t tell me,” I whisper in rage, though the words feel loud.
“Yes,” she agrees, voice faltering. “But he was respecting Matteo. Wouldn’t you do the same?”
Her honesty is heavier than comfort, and I’m in no mood to appreciate it.
I glare at her. “Whose side are you on anyway?”
She arches a brow, amusement flickering in her gaze as she drops her expensive Chanel tote on my desk. “Alessia! I am always on your side, but Nico is also on your side.”
“No he isn’t!” I feel like a sulky child, but the pain inside of me is so big.
No one’s ever fought for me, protected me, and Nico is just one of many who think I’m great but just not great enough to fight the Duca Alighieri.
“I need air!” I fling up my hands up and walk out of the cellar and onto the cool courtyard.
The post-harvest cold creeps in after dusk and doesn’t quite let go by dawn.
The days still hold a trace of warmth, enough to soften the soil, but the nights bite. Frost is uncommon this close to the sea, though the vines have already begun to brace themselves.
The breeze picks up again, riffing through the courtyard, lifting stray tendrils of grapevine.
Alba follows me and reaches for my hands.
I let her take them—warm, steady, her fingers long and reassuring.
“Love without bravery, isn’t worth much,” I tell her. “It’s admiration. Affection. Desire. But it’s not partnership.”
And that’s what hurts so very much. He says he loves me but he didn’t treat me with respect, as an equal, a partner.
Alba rests her forehead against mine.
“He didn’t defend me,” I continue.
“He thinks he’s protecting you.”
“Of course he does.” I draw in a breath scented with must and earth. “He thinks love is shielding. He doesn’t realize it is standing by me when the room turns hostile.”
Alba cups my face in her hands. “What do you want?”
“I don’t want to leave him,” I admit. The confession tastes raw on my tongue. “But I can’t shrink. I won’t.”
“And you shouldn’t.” Her eyes are bright with conviction.
I pat her hands and step away from her and look out at my vines.
“For what it’s worth,” she adds softly, “I don’t think this is over. I think he’s just late to his own courage.”
I turn, meet her gaze. “And what if he never gets there?”
Alba smiles, a small, sad curve of her lips. “Then you will still be you. And that will be enough.”
A gentle silence settles between us. And after what feels like an eternity, I say, “You want to have dinner with me and stay the night?”
“Yes.”
“And listen to me complain about the man in my life?” I deadpan.
She smiles. “Absolutely.”
“He’s a very good lover,” I tell her as we walk to my house.
“He looks like he would be.”
“You mean he has experience?” I goad.
“Alessia, you did marry the playboy of the Italian wine world,” she teases.
I stop and look at her, all my fears surfacing. “Then why does he say he wants me, Alba? I am…I am—”
“The most beautiful, kind, and capable woman he knows. That’s word-to-word what he said to me.”
I don’t want to believe her, but Alba doesn’t lie. And, well, neither does Nico. If he said it, he means it. But what does he know? He’s probably lying to himself to make a good strategic decision from a business perspective.
“He means it, Alessia,” Alba insists as if reading my mind.
“I deleted all his messages,” I told her and feel a little regret for being so angry that I did that. Now I wish I could hear his voice.
She purses her lips as if stifling a smile. “I’m sure he’s going to keep pushing to get back in your good graces. You’ll have new voice messages to delete or…to listen to.”
“You sure?” I ask, all my bravado vanishing. “You sure I haven’t lost him?”
She laughs. “Alessia, you could fuck the entire Viola soccer team, and you wouldn’t lose him.”
I open my door and send her a flat, unimpressed stare.
“You think I overreacted?” I ask as we settle into my living room.
I pull out my phone to text Zoya to send dinner for two to the house.
“About what?”
“Alba!”
She chuckles and raises both her hands palms up.
“Short answer, no.” Her tone becomes somber.
“Look this isn’t about Fontana—but what an asshole, right?
Or Matteo’s job or even Papà. This is about your agency.
You feel the way you feel because Nico decided, repeatedly, that you could not handle the truth. ”
Nico’s sins are not accidental. He didn’t just forget to tell me what was going on with Matteo and my father’s machinations; he made a choice to protect me, but I have a feeling he was protecting himself, avoiding conflict with me.
“If Matteo told me not to tell anyone, would I listen to him?” I muse.
“Matteo is your mentor, not Nico’s,” Alba responds. “Look, Nico doesn’t like conflict, and that’s that. I think he does fine in a business setting when he knows he has the power but when he isn’t sure about the outcome he believes discretion is the better part of valor.”
I narrow my eyes. “How do you know my husband so well?”
This time, she bursts out laughing. “He’s my boss’s boss. I know how he thinks, Alessia.”
I hold up my hand. “Okay, going on a tangent here. What’s going on between Toni and Renzo?”
Alba puts a hand on her heart. “You saw that, too?”
“He’s all cara this and cara that.” I shake my head. “He’s ten years older than her.”
“And he’s her mentor.”
We both shake our heads.
“He’s hot, though,” Alba interjects.
I nod wearily. “Almost as hot as Nico.”
“Can we really blame Toni for hitting that?”
I drag a hand down my face and groan. “Thanks for that visual! Now I need bleach to wash it out of my mind.”
“Oh please, you and Nico have been fucking like rabbits, and you have a problem with Toni getting some?”
“She’s like my kid,” I protest mildly and give Alba a measured look. “Speaking of sex, when was the last time you got laid?”
My sister straightens. “We need wine.”
“How long?” I persist, my eyes narrowed with suspicion.
She gives me a pained look. “Not since…him.”
My eyes widen. “That was like—”
“I know. You don’t have to remind me. Now, will you open some wine, or do you want to know how many cobwebs are growing down there?”
I burst out laughing at the image she conjures. “I’ll open a 2020 100% Cab Franc.”
“That was a damn good vintage,” Alba says as she sinks into the couch. “If we’re going to talk about your fabulous sex life while I’m in a long-term relationship with my rabbit, we need some of that.”
We spend half the night talking, and then we sleep, certain that we’ve found our footing again as sisters.
I know it won’t be nearly so simple to make things right with Nico.