Chapter Fifty Ordinary People, for a Night
Back in the city a week later, Dante surprised her again — smaller this time, but no less deliberate. He arrived home early with a baseball cap and an old jacket she'd never seen him wear, utterly unlike the tailored suits that made up the entirety of his usual wardrobe.
"What is this?"
"A disguise. Badly assembled, I'll admit.
" He looked almost sheepish, an expression so foreign to his face that she laughed outright.
"I want to take you somewhere as ordinary people, Elena.
No Marco. No cameras. No one recognizing the name Moretti.
Just a man and his wife, having a normal evening, the way normal people do. "
It took convincing Marco, and two of Dante's most trusted men positioned discreetly at a distance rather than directly beside them, but that evening, Elena found herself walking through the city holding Dante's hand, unremarkable in the crowd for the first time since her wedding — eating cheap noodles at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant with plastic chairs, wandering through a used bookstore where Dante insisted on buying her three novels she didn't need, sharing a single overpriced ice cream cone on a park bench while the sun went down over a skyline that had once represented, to Elena, nothing but danger.
"This is what I imagined normal life might feel like," she admitted, licking a drip of ice cream from her thumb, "back before any of this happened. Ordinary dates. No armed men within radio distance."
"I'm sorry I can't give you that fully," Dante said, quieter now, some of the lightness fading. "Even tonight, there are men watching from a distance I asked you not to notice. I don't know how to give you a version of me that doesn't require it."
"I don't need that version of you." She leaned into his shoulder, watching the last of the daylight catch gold on the water in the distance. "I need this — you, trying, even within all the limitations neither of us chose. That's enough, Dante. It's more than enough."
He kissed her temple, and for the rest of that evening, walking hand in hand through a city that knew nothing of debts or Dons or the particular danger of loving a man like him, Elena let herself simply exist as an ordinary woman on an ordinary date, exactly as he'd wanted to give her, however imperfectly it came.