Chapter Thirty-Two Nico
They found Nico three days later, at Isabel's quiet insistence, living in a small apartment two towns over from her — not together, not exactly, though the careful distance between their two lives felt, to Elena, like the shape of a love neither of them had figured out how to reclaim.
Nico Moretti looked like an older, sadder echo of Dante — same jaw, same pale eyes, all the sharpness worn down into something tired and defeated instead. He didn't seem surprised to see his cousin at his door.
"I wondered how long it would take you," Nico said, stepping back to let them in, his apartment sparse, functional, entirely without the grandeur of the family he'd left behind. "Salvatore's finally making his move, I take it."
"He is." Dante's voice was careful, unusually gentle. "I'm sorry, Nico. For all of it. I was young when it happened, and I let myself believe silence was the same as innocence. It wasn't."
"No," Nico agreed, without bitterness, only a deep, worn exhaustion.
"It wasn't. But you weren't the one who let it happen, Dante.
That blame belongs entirely to Salvatore, and to my own cowardice, if I'm honest. I loved Isabel.
I still do, God help me. And I let the business matter more than she did, for one week that cost us everything.
I've spent six years regretting that far more than I ever resented your family for it. "
"Have you spoken to her? Since?"
"Twice. Both times, we said everything except the thing that actually matters.
" Nico's eyes, when they lifted to Dante's, were old with grief.
"I don't know how to ask her to forgive a version of myself I can barely forgive on my own.
But watching you, cousin — married, genuinely happy, willing to burn down a restaurant for a woman you'd known only weeks — I find myself wondering if I gave up on something I shouldn't have. "
Elena, quiet until now, leaned forward. "She still thinks about you," she said gently. "I saw it, when we spoke with her. She didn't say it outright, but it was there."
Something shifted in Nico's exhausted face — hope, cautious and unpracticed, the first flicker of it Elena imagined he'd allowed himself in years. "Then perhaps," he said slowly, "it isn't too late to try being brave, the way I should have been the first time."
They left an hour later, Dante quiet and thoughtful in the car beside her, his hand finding hers without needing to be asked.
"Do you think they'll find their way back to each other?" Elena asked.
"I don't know," Dante admitted. "But I know now that silence is the thing that actually destroys people, more than any single act of violence ever could. I don't intend to make that mistake with you, Elena. Not now. Not ever."
She squeezed his hand, and they drove the rest of the way home in a silence that felt, for once, entirely comfortable — two people who had learned, the hard way, exactly what it cost to leave things unsaid.