Chapter Forty-Six The Friends She Kept
It was Dante, in the end, who suggested it — noticing, one evening, the way Elena had gone quiet over a photograph of her old friend Josie that had surfaced on her phone.
"Call them," he said simply. "Invite them here, or meet them in the city, whatever feels safest. I know I asked you to disappear from your old life when this began, out of fear more than necessity. I don't think that fear serves either of us anymore."
The reunion, when it finally happened, was awkward at first — Marianne and Josie and the twins, Della and Frank, sitting stiffly in a private room at a restaurant Dante had arranged, unsure how to address the strange new shape of Elena's life, the armed car that had dropped her off, the careful way she'd had to explain, haltingly, some small fraction of the truth.
"So you're just — married. To a mafia don." Josie said it flatly, testing the words, clearly unconvinced they belonged in the same sentence as the Elena she remembered. "That's not something you just casually mention over text, Elena."
"I couldn't tell you the whole truth for a long time," Elena admitted.
"I'm still not sure how much I'm allowed to share, honestly.
But I wanted you to know I didn't just vanish because I stopped caring.
I vanished because I was scared, and ashamed, and didn't know how to explain any of it without sounding insane. "
"Are you happy?" Marianne asked quietly, the question cutting through the awkwardness more directly than anything else. "Genuinely. Not performing it for our benefit."
Elena considered the question seriously, thinking of Dante burning eggs on Sunday mornings, of guitar badly played on a dock at sunset, of a proposal at the water's edge that owed nothing to any debt at all. "Genuinely," she said. "It didn't start out that way. But yes. I am."
Something in the table's tension eased at that, the old easy affection between them creeping back in by degrees — old jokes remembered, gentle teasing about how dramatically her life had changed, Josie eventually demanding, half-joking, whether Elena's husband had any single friends worth meeting.
"I missed this," Elena admitted later, walking to the car with her oldest friends' laughter still echoing behind her. "I didn't realize how much until just now."
"Then don't disappear again," Della said, hugging her tightly. "Married to a mafia don or not. You're still ours too, Elena. Don't forget that."
Elena promised she wouldn't, and found, driving home afterward with Dante's hand steady on the wheel beside her, that she finally, fully believed she could keep both promises at once — the old life and the new one, no longer required to choose only one.