Chapter Nine The Father Who Made Him
It was Sofia, unexpectedly, who filled in the details Dante himself refused to share — cornering Elena in the Larkspur Row library one afternoon while Dante was occupied with business in the city, settling into the armchair across from her with the easy familiarity of family.
"He'll never tell you the whole truth about his father," Sofia said without preamble, watching Elena carefully. "Pride, mostly. And shame, though he'd deny that second part outright."
"Tell me," Elena said. "Please. I want to understand him properly."
Sofia considered it for a long moment before nodding, slowly.
"Salvatore Moretti Senior was not a kind man," she began.
"He believed weakness was the only true sin a Moretti could commit, and he defined weakness broadly — tears, softness, any affection expressed openly enough that an enemy might exploit it.
Dante's mother, Renata, was the one soft thing he allowed himself, and even that indulgence came with conditions.
Dante was maybe seven, I think, the first time his father locked him in the wine cellar overnight for crying at a funeral.
Not out of cruelty exactly — in his mind, he believed he was training his son for a world that would show no mercy at all. "
Elena's stomach turned. "That's monstrous."
"It was, and Dante knows that now, intellectually.
But knowing something is monstrous doesn't undo the years spent believing it was simply how love worked, in families like ours.
" Sofia's expression softened. "His mother tried to counter it, quietly, in the moments his father wasn't watching — hence the singing in the kitchen, the piano, the small stolen tendernesses he still can't fully let himself revisit.
When she died, there was no one left to counter it at all.
He spent the years after her death becoming almost exactly what his father wanted.
Cold. Untouchable. Successful beyond even his father's ambitions. "
"Until me," Elena said quietly.
"Until you." Sofia reached over, squeezing her hand.
"I watched him change, this past year, in ways I genuinely didn't believe were possible anymore.
He is trying so hard, Elena, to be a different kind of man than the one his father built.
I wanted you to know that, because I don't think he'll ever tell you the full weight of it himself.
He's ashamed of how long it took him to want something better. "
Elena thought of the wine cellar, of a seven-year-old boy locked away for the crime of grieving openly, and felt something in her chest ache fiercely for the man she'd married — not pity, exactly, but a fierce, protective tenderness she hadn't expected to feel this strongly for someone who had once terrified her completely.
That night, she held him a little longer than usual before sleep, and didn't explain why, and Dante, sensing something unspoken in the way she pressed close, simply held her back without asking, as though some old, wordless part of him already understood.