Chapter Fifteen A Night Out, Almost Normal
"I want to take you somewhere ordinary," Dante announced one evening, appearing in the doorway of her sitting room with an expression that looked almost sheepish on a face built for coldness.
"Somewhere with no chandeliers, no two-hundred-person guest lists, no one who wants anything from either of us. "
"Does such a place exist in your life?"
"I'm reliably informed it does. Marco found it for me." He held out his hand, something almost nervous in the gesture. "Will you come? No guards inside, though he'll be close. Just us, for a few hours, pretending to be people who don't have any of this hanging over them."
The restaurant, when they arrived, was small and unglamorous — a family-run trattoria in a quiet neighborhood, mismatched chairs, a menu handwritten on a chalkboard, the owner greeting Dante not with the careful deference of the city's elite but with the easy familiarity of someone who had no idea who he actually was.
"You come here often?" Elena asked, delighted, watching Dante navigate a menu without an ounce of his usual command.
"Never before tonight. I asked Marco to find somewhere no one would recognize me.
" He looked, for the first time since she'd known him, faintly uncertain, like a man discovering an unfamiliar country.
"I wanted one evening where I was simply your husband.
Not the Don. Just Dante, eating overcooked pasta in an ugly chair, embarrassing myself by not knowing what half of this menu means despite being fully Italian. "
"That's the most romantic thing you've said all week."
"I have a list, remember. This barely cracks the top ten." But he was smiling — really smiling, unguarded, the kind of smile Sofia had told her he'd stopped giving the world years ago — and Elena felt something in her chest loosen at the sight of it.
They stayed three hours, long after the meal ended, simply talking — about nothing important, about everything that mattered, about the version of his childhood before his father remade him and the version of hers before her father's debts remade her.
Dante laughed, twice, loud enough to draw looks from a nearby table, and didn't seem to care at all.
"I forgot this was possible," he admitted quietly, walking her back to the car afterward, his hand warm and easy around hers in a way that had nothing to do with possession and everything to do with simple, ordinary affection.
"An evening with nothing at stake. I don't think I've had one since before my mother died. "
"We can have more of them," Elena said softly. "As many as you want. I'll take ordinary over chandeliers any night."
He stopped walking, right there on the quiet street, and kissed her — slow, unhurried, nothing performative in it at all, simply a man kissing his wife because he wanted to and no one important enough to matter was watching.
"Thank you," he murmured against her mouth, "for wanting the ordinary version of me. I didn't think anyone would."