Chapter Seven Learning the Rules
The first weeks at Larkspur Row taught Elena that a house could be beautiful and lonely in equal measure.
The staff were polite to the point of invisibility — a housekeeper named Greta who curtsied slightly whenever Elena entered a room, a cook who prepared elaborate meals Elena often ate alone while Dante worked late, a small army of groundskeepers who tended a garden Elena wasn't yet sure she was allowed to walk in unaccompanied.
"Am I allowed to ask questions?" she asked Greta one afternoon, finding the older woman arranging fresh flowers in the main hall. "Or is that against some rule I haven't learned yet?"
Greta's mouth twitched, the closest thing to a smile Elena had seen from her. "You may ask anything, Signora. Whether I answer depends entirely on the question."
"Fair enough." Elena trailed a finger along the edge of a vase, feeling unmoored in a house that was legally hers now and felt, in every practical sense, like someone else's museum. "How long have you worked here?"
"Eleven years. Since before the old Signore passed." Something shifted behind Greta's careful composure. "Dante was a different man, then. Harder to reach, if such a thing were possible."
"What changed?"
"His father died." Greta set down the last stem, considering her words with obvious care.
"Grief does one of two things to men like the Morettis, Signora.
It hardens them further, or it cracks something open they didn't know was sealed.
I believe, watching him with you these past weeks, that it may finally be doing the latter. "
Elena turned the words over long after Greta had gone, sitting alone in the vast dining room that evening, the empty chair at the head of the table a reminder of exactly how much of this marriage still felt like waiting.
She had expected danger, when she agreed to marry Dante Moretti.
She hadn't quite prepared for the particular loneliness of being surrounded by staff who called her Signora with perfect courtesy and never once asked how she was actually doing.
It was nearly midnight when Dante finally returned, finding her still awake in the sitting room with a book she hadn't managed to read past the first page.
"You waited up."
"I did." She set the book aside. "Dante, can I ask you something, and will you actually answer honestly?"
He sat across from her, some of the day's exhaustion easing from his shoulders at the mere sight of her. "Always."
"Does anyone in this house actually know me? Not know of me — know me. Because right now I feel like I'm living in a very beautiful hotel where everyone is extremely polite and none of them are allowed to actually see me."
Something in his expression shifted — guilt, she realized, quiet and unpracticed.
"I didn't think of that," he admitted. "I've spent so long training the people around me to be discreet, to not ask questions, that I forgot discretion can feel like a kind of erasure, if you're the one living inside it. "
"I don't want erasure. I want a life, Dante. Even a strange, dangerous one. I want it to feel like mine."
He reached for her hand, threading their fingers together with a tenderness that had become, in these early weeks, the only part of her days that felt entirely real.
"Then tell me what that looks like," he said quietly.
"I don't know how to build an ordinary life.
I've never had one. But I'm willing to learn it, if you'll teach me what pieces to start with. "
It wasn't a grand gesture. It wasn't candlelight or guitars or dramatic declarations.
It was simply a man, exhausted from his day, offering to learn something he didn't know how to give — and Elena found, watching him in the lamplight, that small offer meant more to her than anything he could have said instead.